SEO Friendly Web Design

When designing a website, it’s important to encourage visitors who find you on the net to stay on your page and browse for a while. The longer you can keep people at your site, the greater your chance of making a sale. There is probably nothing that will drive visitors away faster than a cluttered, busy-looking, poorly organized site. Here are some tips that should help you produce a clean, concise, and attractive web presence that will keep your customers engaged and wanting more.

• Be Sure That Each Page of Your Site Offers Something Useful.

This point doesn’t associate as much to design as it does to content. But, it is inadvisable to think that you can keep customers on a page that doesn’t have any real information; no matter how appealing it looks. You need to provide something that is interesting or usefull to your visitors first, before you figure out how to make it look nice. So concentrate on that.

If your business plan includes making money from advertising, be sure that you balance the ads with plenty of actual content. You would never pick up a magazine if all the pages were ads, and people wouldn’t stay at your site unless they find something besides sales pitches. Try not to dedicate more than about 25% of your page to ads.

• Give Every Page of Your Site a Focal Point.

Try to put one thing on each of your pages that quickly tells your visitors what they will find there. It can be a graphic, a headline, or an image, but it should express the general topic of the page almost instantly. Once you have the focus in place, be sure you don’t distract from it by crowding too many other elements around it. Let is stand alone and get its message across.

Be sure to put your most important information at the top of your site. Just as a newspaper puts the most essential facts in it’s headline, you should not make your readers hunt for the things they will want to know.

• Don’t Irritate Your Visitors With Tasteless Elements.

Hardly anyone enjoys pop-up windows when they are surfing the net, so it’s a mystery why so many site designers insist on using them. Studies on marketing indicate that pop-ups can actually deter people from coming back to your site, and rarely lead to an increase in sales or click-throughs.

You should also be mindful that people who have slow connections will be irritated if you force them to wait while lots of large-file graphics and sounds are loading. They just want to see the content, without having to spend hours getting there.

• Use Crisp Lines

Special effects like shadows, blurring, glows, and fading may be useful for some purposes but they tend to make a website look fuzzy and crowded. It is best to stick to sharp, clearly defined lines to get the clean look you are after.

The font you choose should also be crisp and easy to read. Nothing can clutter up a site like some clunky type style font that makes things look too amateurish and unprofessional. All of this may seem a bit tedious, but there are a number of San Diego Internet Marketing web design companies that can do all the dirty work for you. Concentrate on your content instead of on how it looks, even though some of these companies offer excellent content development for your site as well.

• Use Plenty of White Space

Be sure that the different elements on your web page don’t look like they are fighting with each other for the readers attention. That can be most easily accomplished by using enough open space around each text box, navigation bar, or image so that it is distinct from it’s neighbors. You don’t have to have tons of white space, but use enough to make a nice border or gutter for each piece.

In closing, remember to consider your customer when choosing the design elements that you add to your site. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different looks, and pay attention to other web sites that offer similar products to yours. When you find a site that pulls you in and makes you want to stay awhile, look carefully at how it is designed. With a little practice you can design clean, inviting web pages that will help you bottom line. Give SD Internet Marketing a call and let our team of web design professionals help get your site up and running, and most importantly, make it profitable.