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Simple Tips on How To Design a Good-looking Web Site

So, you’re thinking of putting a website together for your business. That’s a pretty good idea. A website can make a big difference to your business, even if it has only basic information (name of business, phone number, location with map, and business hours) along with a description of what you do and the products you have for sale. It opens windows of business opportunity that may never have been there.

However, just throwing one together haphazardly can also do your business a disservice. Your site must make it easy for your customers and suppliers to find the information they need. Not flashy, but professional. Not busy, but informative. Not trendy, but classy.

If you're looking for a good consumer reaction to your site, it needs to be both easy to read and easy to navigate from one page to the next. The longer it takes someone to search for the information they want, the less likely they will stay on your site and spend any money.

I have gone through the pages of computer and web design magazines such as PC World, Wired Magazine, and others to find the best and most helpful tips for designing a visitor friendly website. These are six of the most asked most common suggestions we found on how to make your web site design work.

1. The number one most important thing you should always be aware of when designing a website is to, and I can’t stress this enough, is to make a good first impression. There is one thing that is paramount to any successful web site or business and that is someone’s first impression. No matter what you think, you are influenced by your first impression. If your website looks unprofessional or amateurish, the site visitor isn’t going to stay long on your site. If you don't take that into account, you're not only waiting a potential customer’s time, you’re wasting your own.

2. You should match the overall theme of your Web site to the type of business you’ll be doing. Try to have a design with your audience in mind by creating the site to reflect its content and message. Most people wouldn't find a social site like MySpace’s style all that reassuring for a site devoted to health care or financial investments.

3. Think about the psychology of colors and what kind of emotions they produce. Red might not be the best choice of colors for an investment group, given that color's connotation of red ink. Black evokes feelings of prestige; yellow evokes warmth, bright orange sprightliness, for example.

4. Don't use trendy or “cool” fonts. As with any kind of trend of fad, what is cool and hip today won’t be before you know it. Unless you have the time to spend re-designing your site every year or so, play it safe and stick with the standard sets of fonts such as Times and Arial.

5. Step back from the line by line aspect of your site and look at the overall visual hierarchy of your site. Starts from its overall concept, and then we work our way in to its each individual pages. By that I mean, we first see aesthetics on a Web site, and those aesthetics, if properly used, direct our attention to the message. Keep in mind, the amount of “visual candy” should be relevant to the content of the site. A Web site for retail clothing will be a lot more colorful and arty than a web site for computer repair. Take a look at your newspaper. Its content is king because that's what we want from a newspaper. A few photos break up the type and support the stories. That’s what your website should be like. If there are images, they are usually in the form of information graphics, such as pictures, charts and graphs, to back up the message you are trying to get across.

6. To take another page from newspaper people, use columns, just like a newspaper does. Columns have been used for centuries to break up large expanses of type, and for good reason. Any line of text more than 68 characters wide tends to become difficult to read and you’ll lose the attention of the reader. Nothing will drive a site visitor crazy more than a site with wall-to-wall text with no visual rest. Breaking your content into columns prevents that from happening.

Making a good impression on your customers with a well-designed Web site will pay you back the money you spend to hire a graphics designer many times over in the long run. I encourage you to take a long look at your Web site through your customers' eyes, whether you already own a site or are thinking about putting one together.