Principles for creating a good business website

Your business website is your office on the web where you will do business. In fact, you need to perform many functions. It has to be the front of the store, the reception and the salesperson, everything.

It would become a reflection of your business, the quality of your product and your brand.

Therefore, your website should look professional and well done. However, it doesn’t have to be fancy, flashy, and expensive. All your site requires is a clean, simple layout and it should be well structured and easy to navigate.

A simple exercise that would help you differentiate between good and bad web design is to browse and browse the sites in your niche.

There are some websites that would appeal to you and you would like to stay longer. And there would be others you’d like to run away from.

You only know when you see a good page and a bad one.

Scan the pages. Write down what you like and what you don’t as you browse. Identify the problems and write them down.

Take special note of the great professional websites they are doing.

Most of them would have a simple design!

When creating products, we had taken into account the needs of people. When creating a website, we must take into account the browsing habits of people. On the Internet, people mostly come to search for the information. Most of the information is text based. If a fancy page has no information or substance, it offers no value.

With these things and your research in mind, here are some other important points to keep in mind when planning your website design.

* Keep the page size as small as possible. This can be achieved by using minimal and smaller graphic files, i.e. using a small logo and images only if absolutely necessary.

* Maintain consistency throughout the site. Keep the same source at all times. Your website should look the same or similar across the page and across all pages. The different colored background for each page is a bit unprofessional.

* Be generous with blank spaces. Do not clutter or congest your page. Format your page well. Leave a reasonable amount of margins on each side and center your text. Use line and paragraph breaks! People scan web pages instead of reading, therefore dividing your text into paragraphs would allow your visitor to absorb more with less effort.

* Don’t use pretty fonts, backgrounds, and graphics. Don’t use fancy animations or effects. Your page should look honest, direct, and easy to navigate.

Before you publish your page, you need to see what your page actually looks like in the web browser. You should at least see your page in Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Mozilla Firefox.

Use these principles and you will create good web pages.