The number of online customers continues to grow as the growth of the internet continues.
Your business relies on the ability of your website to attract these customers, get them engaged in your message and build enough trust for them to contact you.
It's important that your customer can find their way around your website easily.
A clean and simple web design is always best for this very reason.
Visitors to your website want to be able to navigate around like it's second nature.
No one wants to spend any amount of time trying to figure out how to do things on your website.
All that they want is to be able to find the products and services they're looking for, and to do it quickly.
Flash and glitzy techno-tricks do not impress someone who knows what they're searching for.
Scrap the flash.
Today, Web 2.
0 is all the rage.
So it's important to include a place for your visitors to communicate with you.
Use a blog and let your visitors comment.
Also make links to your Twitter and Facebook pages available.
Clarity should be the first priority on each of the pages on your website.
It should be readily apparent as to what the page is all about, and easy to understand.
Most of our clients want direct-response websites and so we make almost all of the pages into a contact page.
We invite the visitor to send a note, or to call in.
This works really well to get customer responses.
Of course this isn't traditional web design which says one contact us page.
But it works for us.
You also need to keep the search engine bots in mind when designing a website.
The 'bots of course are the Google Bot, Bing, and Yahoo.
So you need to make sure that they can easily navigate your site.
If the "bots" can't get around your site because of dead links or other problems, they'll leave and not rank your site as high as they might have.
Simple is the most effective way.
Sometimes our customers will ask us for white lettering on a dark background.
We always recommend that they go with the lighter, cleaner background and darker coloured text.
Your visitors eyes will thank you for this cleaner and easier to see appearance.
Now that we've talked about Google and your web visitors, let's talk about you.
Yes your business.
After all your website needs to provide whatever your objectives are.
For the most part that means getting more business.
So don't forget that you need an effective SEO strategy.
Continual SEO for your web design will make it pay off.
A great website design might not be what you think.
Keep it clean, keep it simple, do some SEO, and reap the benefits.
Focus more on your visitor, and less on the flashy technology.