Great web site design is important to your website’s success. If the website design is effective, it would increase traffic to the site and also improve sales. On the other hand, a bad design can hinder website usage despite exceptional products and service. Consider the following dos and don’ts when designing your website to turn it into a profit center for your business:

Top 10 Dos of Great Website Design

1. Do simplify onsite search and navigation. Your website design should enable quick and easy search of required information. All pages also need to have the important links to information that would boost the user experience. Any useful information should not be more that two or three clicks away else you risk losing the user. The faster your customers can navigate through your website and find what they are looking for, the more likely you are to get repeat visits from them.

2. Do keep your website content simple and easy to understand. All content on the site must be clear and easy to understand else you risk losing the user’s attention. develop content such that it focuses on customer problems and offers efficient solutions to them.

3. Do give your site a consistent look and feel. Creating a consistent look and feel for your whole website through the use of similar fonts, colors and layouts is a must to give it a professional look. Linked pages especially should use consistent font styles, graphics and colors.

4. Do make your site available on multiple browsers. Users may visit your website using many different web browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer or Chrome. Increasingly large number of users are surfing web sites on the mobile phones. It may make sense to test the site for access on mobile web browsers.

5. Do put your contact information on every page.

List your physical address including other contact information like phone and email on the ‘Contact Us’ page. It is also important to list phone and email at the bottom of each page for easy availability.

6. Do make sure that each page has the most important information at the top of the page so that the user knows exactly what the page is about and if they want to scroll down or not.

7. Do use high-quality graphics and pictures. Keep a good balance between the image resolution and time to load them. High quality graphics will attract users but would be a turn off if they take too long to load.

8. Do use bullets, icons, boldface and italicized words, color and headline to draw customer attention to most important segments of your content.

9. Do make sure that your security and privacy policy are easily visible to customers and stated in clear terms. Take all important steps to make your website secure for customers.

10. Do use clear and concise page titles. Users see web page title in search results and clear effective titles can considerably increase the traffic coming to your website.

Top 10 Don’ts of Great Website Design

1. Don’t clutter up your web pages with an excessive amount of information or they become hard to read and navigate. Each page should ideally deal with only one topic, product or category. If you plan to place advertisement on the site, make sure does not interrupt or you would lose the visitors.

2. Don’t go overboard while using audio and video features that use high bandwidth. These can make your pages slow to load, frustrating the customers and discouraging website usage.

3. Don’t use text and color combination that makes content tough to read. Additionally, don’t include distracting visuals on your web pages.

4. Don’t add unnecessary or irrelevant information or features to your website. Adding content and features on your website that don’t carry any meaning for visitors is a waste of time and bandwidth.

5. Don’t let the content and links on your website become outdated. Regularly refresh the content and update the links to pertinent information. Outdated links are annoying and can seriously affect your business reputation.

6. Don’t stuff the site with technical terms or jargon unless your website is designed to address the needs of a small segment of technical people. Additionally, avoid using conflicting information in your web pages. In addition to confusing customers, such information gives a highly negative and unprofessional image to your website.

7. Don’t use flashing icons and text as that can distract browsers and may be detrimental to the popularity of your website.

8. Don’t fill up your web pages with advertisements. Also, limit pop-ups as they can irritate prospects.

9. Don’t include introductory advertisements on the first page before your web content appears. Such advertisements put customers in a sore mood even before they see your content.

10. Don’t just brag about your company’s achievements. Provide your clients with easy to consume information and back it up with references and customer testimonials to enable them to judge your performance.

Follow the dos and steer clear of the don’ts to design an effective website, and greatly enhance the chances of successful web entrepreneurship. - Daljeet Sidhu is the author of this article.