The age of the Internet is maturing and the standard of websites is so much higher than it was just a few short years ago. However, many business owners are still making some basic errors with their web design and if corrected, could lead to more visitors and more customers.
Whilst it may be tempting to dazzle your customers with an array of colourful animated menus, fancy sounds and impressive but slow loading graphics, it can only do harm to your business. Websites that are designed in this way are designed so as to satisfy the business owner and not the customer. This is a fundamental error that will lose you business. Keep everything simple and logical, the visitor should know within a split second of viewing your site, who you are, what you do and what image you are trying to convey.
Ask yourself what you would do if you hit upon a website and could not find what you were looking for in a short space of time. You would hit the back button wouldn't you? Well your customers might be doing the very same thing. When you design structure of your navigation, do it as if you were designing it for the world's most impatient person. When it comes to the Internet, almost all website visitors do fall into this category!
The text should be very dark on a very light background or vice versa. There are so many different types of screen that you do not know how your website will look to your visitors. By following this simple principle, you can ensure that your visitors can at least read the content.
Some of your visitors will read all of the text on your website. However, many will only skim the page. Therefore, all your text should be liberally sprinkled with relevant headlines so that it is apparent at a glance, what the main subject of the page is.
There are so many rumours floating around about techniques you can use to trick the search engines into placing your site on page one. In the unlikely event that such a trick would work, it is only a matter if time that the trick works, it can only be a matter of time before the search engines become wise to it and either stop the benefit or drop you altogether. So write the site for your customers and stay on topic and the search engines will follow you and for the long term.