Designing your own website
>> Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Just about everyone, at some time during their quest to become the next famous Internet millionaire, has designed (or redesigned) their own website. Some have had great success, while others suffered miserable failure. If you are wondering, failure is much more common.
This is because a true web designer often has a formal education and has spent years honing their skills to learn the best approach. You see, there is so much more to designing a website than just looks. You have to think about details like usability, conversions and SEO, to name just a few.
While professionals like Wildfire Marketing Group can certainly design a powerful and effective website for you, your goal is to design your own, either because you're on a budget, or you're an aspiring web designer. In either case, be ready for lots of learning and hard work. A proper web design checklist can help to make sure you cover all your bases-as long as you follow it!
Here are a few of the basics. The more intricate details will require some more research and tools.
1. Appearance
I hate to sound shallow, but looks matter. Over 83% of your potential clients will visit your website before choosing to do business with you, and their impression of your company will be formed in just a few seconds. If you can't impress them quickly, you'll probably lose them. If you're not a "natural" artist, don't spend a lot of time on this since your goal is to make money with your website. Instead, invest in a quality template and modify it to meet your needs.
2. Speed
People are busy, and when they visit your website, they expect it to download quickly. So don't fill it up with tons of over-sized graphics, scripts and poorly written code. And no matter what, skip the music or those annoying intro videos. No one cares about them, and most people will either hit the mute button, or even worse, the back button. The faster your pages load, the better.
3. Usability
Flash can be great for some things, but never design your entire site, or your navigation with it. If someone doesn't happen to have it installed (anyone on a smart phone, for example) they are unable to access your website. Plus, the search engines really can't crawl or index your content within a flash site anyway. The bottom line is to make sure your site doesn't rely on anything that your visitors may not have installed.
4. Call to action
Not having a call to action is like spending the entire night taking to a pretty woman, but not asking for her phone number. You've put a lot of work into designing your website, and probably even more work into driving traffic to it. Do you really want to just hope that your visitors are so excited that they spend the time to figure out what you want them to do, and then do it? They won't. So you need to make it clear and simple - if you want them to buy something, your headlines and buttons should clearly tell them that. The same applies signing up for your newsletter or RSS feed or whatever action you want them to take.
This is because a true web designer often has a formal education and has spent years honing their skills to learn the best approach. You see, there is so much more to designing a website than just looks. You have to think about details like usability, conversions and SEO, to name just a few.
While professionals like Wildfire Marketing Group can certainly design a powerful and effective website for you, your goal is to design your own, either because you're on a budget, or you're an aspiring web designer. In either case, be ready for lots of learning and hard work. A proper web design checklist can help to make sure you cover all your bases-as long as you follow it!
Here are a few of the basics. The more intricate details will require some more research and tools.
1. Appearance
I hate to sound shallow, but looks matter. Over 83% of your potential clients will visit your website before choosing to do business with you, and their impression of your company will be formed in just a few seconds. If you can't impress them quickly, you'll probably lose them. If you're not a "natural" artist, don't spend a lot of time on this since your goal is to make money with your website. Instead, invest in a quality template and modify it to meet your needs.
2. Speed
People are busy, and when they visit your website, they expect it to download quickly. So don't fill it up with tons of over-sized graphics, scripts and poorly written code. And no matter what, skip the music or those annoying intro videos. No one cares about them, and most people will either hit the mute button, or even worse, the back button. The faster your pages load, the better.
3. Usability
Flash can be great for some things, but never design your entire site, or your navigation with it. If someone doesn't happen to have it installed (anyone on a smart phone, for example) they are unable to access your website. Plus, the search engines really can't crawl or index your content within a flash site anyway. The bottom line is to make sure your site doesn't rely on anything that your visitors may not have installed.
4. Call to action
Not having a call to action is like spending the entire night taking to a pretty woman, but not asking for her phone number. You've put a lot of work into designing your website, and probably even more work into driving traffic to it. Do you really want to just hope that your visitors are so excited that they spend the time to figure out what you want them to do, and then do it? They won't. So you need to make it clear and simple - if you want them to buy something, your headlines and buttons should clearly tell them that. The same applies signing up for your newsletter or RSS feed or whatever action you want them to take.
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When you need website design that produces results, Wildfire Marketing Group can help you get the success you deserve.
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