When you are starting a website on a strict budget, you usually have to do everything yourself. Of course, there is a learning curve for each task you undertake. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it yourself, it just means you should arm yourself with adequate knowledge.
One of those tasks which should be given a lot of consideration is your Website Design. This is extremely important.
Your website is the chance to make a first impression with potential clients. You have a very short window of opportunity to grab a visitor’s attention and make them want to stay.
Here are some tips to consider as you go about designing your own ecommerce website.
Determine The Goals Of Your Website
Until you know what you want to achieve and how, you cannot properly design your website to fill those needs. Take into account your product or service, your niche market, and your target clientele.
What do you need to provide to visitors? Will you need product pages with detailed descriptions and a shopping cart? Or will a simple blog more suffice for your affiliate marketing needs? Do you want to provide information and interesting content or should you focus more on driving conversion rate? All of these factors should be taken into account.
Define Your Brand
One of the most basic concepts in marketing is branding. This simply means coming up with a logo and a tag line and a purpose statement. All of these things together will help you create your own ‘brand’, and differentiate you and your business from the competition.
A tag line, in particular, can be a great promotional tool. Devise a good one that succinctly states what your business is all about and use it again and again throughout your pages. A logo, while not necessarily essential, can become the basis of your site’s background.
Examine The Competition
One of the best ways to figure out what you want and what you don’t is to visit the websites of several of your competitors. Go through the sites thoroughly and visit each page. Note what you like about each, and what is frustrating or annoying. Your potential clients are bound to agree with your assessment.
Do not feel guilty about ‘borrowing’ another’s ideas. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. If a competitor’s site includes a page that seems highly popular, take inspiration from that – but make it your own.
Make It Easy To Read And Navigate
One mistake that many Website Design novices make is creating pages that are flashy and filled with animation. They tend to go overboard with graphics and loud colours. They find a cute, quirky font and use it everywhere.
Think about your potential customers and what they will encounter when visiting your site. For one thing, each page needs to fit on their viewing screen. Remember that some people still use an old relic of a monitor with a small screen.
Visitors also need to be able to easily read the content on the page. Use standard, sans serif fonts in a standard size. Think about the difficulty of reading coloured text against a dark background. If you really want someone to read your content, use black text and a white background.
Forget Flash animation to ensure that the pages load quickly on anyone’s computer. You may not mind waiting several minutes to see your creative, inspired Flash animation piece load, but visitors likely will not. Plus, search engines cannot, or find it very difficult to, recognise this type of content.
There are many options today for creating a website with easy-to-understand instructions and tools. If you have little experience with HTML, consider a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) software program.
Don’t be afraid to start your own Website Design, but do keep in mind these tips to make it friendly to both visitors and search engines.
About Sean Rasmussen
I know that when I go to a site I hate when there is too much clutter on the page. I want to see what I am looking for and not have to wade through all the useless clutter some people insist on including.
Website designing is very interesting to do. There are lots of stuffs you need to know about and lots of terminology to familiarize. If you need some resources to, there are lots of ready to read articles to read upon.
Agree Greg
It is very annoying if they don’t have good navigation and you see is rubbish
So many good factors her to be taken into account when designing a website. How you are going to build it is important, so planning ahead is necessary. Once you have found a niche product then you decide the best web design to market it.
Hi Jill,
I think it’s a great idea to design your site around the product you’re going to market. I also think you should consider your target audience and the kinds of themes and colours that they’d respond to.
Hi Sean,
I guess it’s better to keep things simple. I think maybe less trying to impress with flashy things and more substance. Again, there’s a lot to apply.
Hi Sean
Many things to think about here. I haven’t even thought about branding, but yes, it is important in any business to be identified by your brand name/logo etc in order to stand out from the crowd.That will be a work in progress.
Great ideas about dressing up the blog, I agree with Greg that I do not want clutter on my blogs, just the right balance. I have been looking at other people’s blogs lately getting ideas.
Thanks Sean
Good advice, quick loading website that grabs your attention but doesn’t annoy you is important. It’s a good idea to think in terms of your potential customers with your website design.
Websites that use coloured backgrounds with coloured fonts are a real pain in the a…! I leave them straight away – they just hurt my eyes.
Easy to navigate: read that as user-friendly – have you ever been on a site where you just can’t find something, like ‘support’, ‘help’ and so on. It’s amazing how many big time sites are like that! And, menus to the left please!
I like that idea about a tag line – I think I could certainly re-work that on my sites. One does get me page 1 ranking – but that isn’t my money site!
I have loads of good content on my sites – and I wonder if that is a problem for product awareness and promotion?
I know I need to do more work on them – but I would welcome any comments/review if anyone cares to do it
http://www.affiliatemarketingcentral.net
http://www.betterhouseandgarden.net
If anyone can do this I would like to give them my e-book on growing roses successfully.
Looking through my photos to see what I can put on my blog to make it a little personal.
One step at a time for me.
Like Elly, I have been noting blog designs that I like.
That’s a good idea Brenda – using your own photos. They will be unique and about you that way – not something generic off the web that others also use!
Even simple little things like using headers and colouring them helps. (plus its good SEO!)
There are all sorts of templates out there that you can use – just make sure they have a customisable option
WYSIWYG website design is very easy…I have just started, with the aid of a friend, creating a website and within a few hours you can quite comfortably navigate around the page. Also if I open a webpage that is flashy and/or takes a long time to load I leave before even reading anything as I often open several pages and what I am looking for is more than likely on the other page. Cool content Sean m/
Hi Jazz,
Makes good sense, thanks for the feedback, to design the site around my product rather than me trying to fit a product into my site. Sounds good.
I’m also still trying to get my head around on how to find a target audience. lol
very detailed information and thanks for such a awesome tips regarding website design aspects….