Designing your own website
September 30, 2011 by Mike Ramsey
Filed under Affiliate Marketing
Just about everyone, at some time during their quest to become the next big Internet millionaire, has designed (or redesigned) their own website. Some have had great success, while others suffered horrible failure. If you happen to be wondering, failure is much more common.
This is because a true web designer usually has a formal education and has spent years perfecting their skills to learn the best approach. You see, there is so much more to designing a website than just how it looks. You have to understand 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, your goal is to design your own website, either because you’re on a budget, or you’re a budding web designer. In either case, be prepared for lots of learning and hard work. A 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 in-depth details will require some more research and tools.
1. Appearance
Looks really do matter. Almost all of your potential clients will visit your website before choosing to do business with you, and the impression you make on them will be formed in just a few seconds. If you can’t impress them quickly, you’ll probably lose them forever. If you’re not a “natural” artist, don’t waste a lot of time on this. Your goal is to make money with your website, so instead, invest in a quality template and modify it for your needs.
2. Speed
People are busy, and when they visit your website, they expect it to open right up. So don’t load it up with tons of bloated graphics, JavaScript and poorly written code. And whatever you do, avoid 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.
When you need website design that produces results, Wildfire Marketing Group can help you get the success you deserve.
