Here are 3 rules of web design that you should ALWAYS remember when you are thinking of designing your website, re-designing your website or making alternations to your website.
Forget any one of them and your website could turn into a waste of time, money and space.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should
There are lots of things you can do with a website and lots of things you can include in your website.
You can have bright colours, flashing lights, dancing bears, your favourite music from your teenage years and much more but just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
If your website is about selling your products or services how will dancing bears and your favourite music improve your chances of making a sale?
If your website is about business, then your website needs to look professional. It needs to look like a business website.
It needs to send a message to the people who visit your website that they can rely on your business.
Will dancing bears, flashing lights and music do that for you? I think not.
Just because you do doesn’t mean anyone else does
Beauty might be in the eye of the beholder but when it comes to websites the “beauty” perceived by the website owner is seldom what anyone else sees.
You might like pastel colours, unusual fonts and something quite different for the navigation but is that what your site visitors want to find?
Do they want to have to squint to ready your text or struggle with fonts that may look wonderful but are impossible to read?
When it comes to business websites your potential customers want the information clearly displayed in a format that they can understand.
If they can’t find the information that they are looking for then they leave because they know that someone else will give them what they want.
If you’re not in the business of entertaining then don’t try and entertain.
If you have a business website then it’s there to sell your products or your services … and maybe do a little educating as well.
It’s not there to entertain people and the more you try to entertain the fewer sales your website will generate. When people come to a business website they expect information and some way to buy what you’re selling … they don’t want to be entertained and if you try they will perceive that as being a waste of their time.
While most people tend to waste a lot of time online they don’t want to do it when they are trying to do business.
Every item that goes into building your business website should be there for no other reason than to sell your products or services.
Anything that doesn’t do that is a waste of space and will only encourage people to look somewhere else for what they want.
