Web Design Basics: If You Aren't Using These Design Tips, Your Visitors Aren't Staying

By Author: Bruce Tucker
Total Articles: 174
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I have written a number of articles on how to market and advertise your website for free through article marketing. Then I receive numerous emails from people saying they tried it and their visitors have not increased that much and they don't stay once they get there. Using Google analytics they see how long a visitor stayed and how they surfed and the results they see aren't pretty.

I then go and visit their websites only to find they are terribly and poorly designed. You can't find anything on them, the color scheme makes your eyes water, you get the famous debug this code message as if every web surfer is now a web developer, and of course the ever irritating scroll off the page to the right. And these are the things I see in the first 30 seconds of a website.

I immediately email them back saying you need to redevelop your website. I don't care how you advertise if your website falls into any of the categories above people will not stay. Here are some development tips that could mean the difference between someone staying and someone leaving.

Navigation
Make it easy for your visitors to find ...
... things. If they need to log in do they have to go through four or five links to get to the log in screen? Good navigation is when the visitor clicks no more than two links to get there and sometimes no more than one click.

Soft and Clean
Is the color scheme and layout of your website hard on the eyes? Do you use a lot of dark and uninviting colors? That is another reason why they don't stay. Use softer lighter colors and make sure if you use multiple colors that these colors compliment each other and work together. Also make sure the visitor does not have to scroll off the right side of the screen to see the entire website. If you have to make the visitor scroll down or hopefully not at all, and adding too much information to a single page overwhelms most users to the point where they will just leave. So keep each page simple.

Speed
Design your website for speed. Graphics, Flash and sound all make a website great but if it takes forever to load most people won't stick around. Make your site load faster by using as much HTML as possible, smaller graphic files, loading of Flash and sound files as needed as opposed to loading them regardless of whether they get used or not. If a visitor has to wait they will leave.

These are just three ideas you can implement today that won't cost you more than a day or two of development on your website. All you have to do is look at some of the better websites on the internet to see how they align their navigation and color schemes and you will see why they are extremely popular.

Once you have your site to the point where it makes the most sense for the visitor, then get back to utilizing the article marketing techniques that I have written about in the past.
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