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.