Your website is your online business card. You’ve probably heard this many times, but it’s true. If you want people to take you seriously, you need a good looking website. I’ll give you a couple quick tips on how to improve upon what you have. Some of these might be no-brainers, but bear with me and hopefully you can glean something from it.
Color Scheme
Your colors have to be relevant to what your purpose is. Someone selling organic vegetables shouldn’t have a site designed with hot pink as their primary color. Instead, green would be the obvious choice for them. Keep in mind your visitors. Just because you like a color doesn’t mean they will too.
Pictures
Everyone loves to have pictures on their site, but seriously, there is a such thing as too many. If a page takes a long time to load on a broadband connection, just imagine what it’ll do to a dial-up connection (yes, they still exist). Plus, keep in mind your picture file size. With HTML, you can shrink the size of a picture, but it doesn’t shrink the size of the file, so the whole thing loads in the browser. This is especially important to understand if you take pictures with a digital camera. The file sizes are 2MB or more per picture, when really they should be under 100KB for the website. Makes a big difference, and even with a fast connection they load slow.
Layout
This one is easy. Does your website look cluttered? Does it make sense where everything is laid out? Do you REALLY need that much stuff on one page? If it’s hard to find something on a webpage, odds are it’s too cluttered or the layout is done poorly. Your layout has to make sense to your visitor. People today have a tiny attention span, so if they can’t find what they want immediately, they’ll go somewhere else. The navigation of your website should be clearly marked, all links should look like links, and major items should pop out to the visitor.
These are just three quick examples of site design tips. I’ll provide more later.
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