Design Practices for a User-Friendly Website
by Patricia Lemieux-Lewis
Your website is where your home based business resides, more like the headquarters of a brick and mortar company. Hence, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.
Below is a list of tips to make your home based business website the most user-friendly.
- Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be readily apparent on all pages and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.
- Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not, they are not necessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
- Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks are not too large because this will deter visitors from reading your content.
- Make sure your website complies with web standards at www.w3.org and make sure it is cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but appears distorted in Firefox and Opera, you will lose a lot of prospective customers.
- Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and some even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because they cannot see it.
- Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.
Taking the time to cater to the potential customer with your website design will produce profits for your home based business because people, in general will return to an informative site where they were easily able to find what they were looking for. This means success for your home based business.
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