Does your website suck?

Building a great website is within the grasp of anyone who wants it. Staying focused and understanding your goals is key. In doing so, you will make the site easier to manage and more concise.

How a site functions will immediately set a marginal site apart from an exceptional one. Websites have as varied a number of functions as there are stars in the sky, but they do have functions. A killer site performs those functions extremely well over and over again, and with as much ease as possible. Something as simple as making sure you use a contact form instead of a mailto: link can make all the difference as to whether your prospective customers will actually contact you or not. Remember, if it doesn't work, it ain't that great!

The Information Architecture (IA) is possibly one of the most critical areas of the design of a site. The IA is basically how the site will be laid out, and how the visitor will be asked to navigate it. How will the navigation links be displayed? What resources should be placed on the index home page versus secondary pages? When a visitor comes to the site what are they looking for and how easy is it to find? When you are visiting a truly exceptional website, you never think about these questions. You simply look for a moment, then flow to where you want to be next. That is what great IA is about.

The colours and style of your website will have a lot to do with who the site is intended for. These things tend to be more emotional than logical, but are still very important. You need to make sure your visitor can identify with the aesthetics of the site. They must be comfortable and have a positive reaction to the colors and layout of your site. So, while this will vary from individual to individual, just make sure you keep your audience in mind when designing the graphic components of the website.

A slow Load time for a website is always a sure way to lose a visitor before they even get to your website. They teach this in every basic website design course from here to China, but getting that fat content out there is just too tempting. Video and bump'n Flash animations are all the rage, but they have to be used where and when appropriate or they will cause more harm than good. A great site has a great load time.

Great content will always be the corner stone of any great website. Offer timely and valid information and people will value your site. This can be in the form of images, text, music, schedules, etc...I can't stress enough how important this is.

How current and up-to-date a site's information is can make or break it. Exemplary websites will always be 100% current and be used as an almost real-time communication tool to interact with their visitor base. Stale content, even if it was all the rage last month, often times just won't cut it for today's best websites.

Keeping your visitors safe is a big one. This can be more difficult for some sites than others, but the mantra remains the same. Security comes first: then function. All exceptional websites go the extra mile to make sure their visitors can safely visit and engage in ecommerce with the knowledge that their personal and financial information remains safe.

Article Source: http://www.articlesfeed.com

About the author: Dustin Dickens is a professional website designer located on the Costa Del Sol in Spain. Get Dustin's expert guide on how to be certain your business website design doesn't blow!

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