Six Basic Design Elements of Successful Websites

Designing a successful website is simpler than most people think. Sticking to the basics of web page and website designing is still the advanced technique to design a website that attracts visitors and sells your products.

Simple Appearance

Website designers have long left behind sophisticated designing of web pages. The success of near white Google homepage has given out the idea that simple is good when it comes to web page designing.

The point in simple page designing is to help visitors go to the pages relevant to them, without being bombarded with hundreds of page elements and links.

When the web page doesn’t bombard with too much of resources, chances are higher that the visitor will take an action that will become profitable to the website.

If the web page designer is told to take a specific action, he/she will take that action. If you bombard with complex visual images and hundreds of link-choices, it is going to confuse the visitor and chances are higher that the visitor leaves the page without taking ANY action.

Easy Navigation

This is a continuation of point 1. When the visitor decides to take an action, he/she should be able to go to the appropriate page straightaway.

If a visitor reaches a product listing page and decides to put an order, he/she should be presented with the link to the order confirmation page in the right locations. If it is hard to find the relevant link, the sale is gone in one click.

A hierarchically arranged website also must contain relevant menus and sub-menus to make navigation between different pages easier.

Good Content, Relevant Content

Content is text. This is the default thought of most web-developers. Text is content. Images are also content. Both elements are important for the success of a website. There are websites that don’t contain any image too. But in most cases, there should be images.

Video is also content. Websites that use video must use them in a minimum. That is only a single video in a page. More than that will eat up the bandwidth of not only the web host, but also of the visitor.

The point in text, image and video content is that they must be relevant to the theme of the web page and the website.

Don’t use any text, image or video that doesn’t add value to the theme of the page.

Sales Copy that Converts

Without a convincing sales copy, your website is not going to perform like what it was intended to.

Sales copy can have a listing of features, but a listing of features doesn’t make a sales copy that converts visitors to customers. A good sales copy must tell the visitors what they can do with your product or service. Talk pleasantly about what they will be doing once they have this product in their hands. If describing your product requires too much technical terms, scratch it off into a click through pop up page or a separate section within the sales copy. Two benefits for this approach. The long list of technical terms doesn’t interrupt the reading and the visitors can see all the technical details at a single place.

Uncluttered HTML Code

This is primarily for search engine purposes. The meta tags (title, keywords, description) etc must be neat and to the point, as if a human visitor reads the content.

The page title that comes in must contain one important keyword that most people search to reach the product you sell. The meta tags for keywords and description must also be short and must contain one, two or three related keywords. Squeezing in more keywords than necessary actually works against you. Instead stick to one main keyword and two sub-keywords. This will tell the search engine spiders clearly about what the page is about. Remember this technique is not a solution to optimize the page for Google.

Always check for broken links. If a visitor clicks a link in your website and reaches nowhere, it is bad image for your website – both from visitor side and search engine side.

Quick Loading of Pages

This should be a priority in web page designing. People will be accessing your website through a broadband connection OR a dial up connection. You can’t ignore the people who log into your website at 56 kbps. If people can’t see your website, there is no point in spending thousands of dollars in designing, developing and hosting the website. Thus the size of the page should be preferably less than 56 kb, with all the images and visual elements included. If your page has video content, this size can go up. It is normal for people to expect the videos to load too slow or not load at all in dial up connections.

Take the necessary care to ensure the pages load quickly that your visitors can get impressed with the appearance of your website, attracted to the ease of navigation, content and can get amused with the sales copy so that they can buy from you today.