Website Design Guide and Advice

You Have 10 seconds to Keep Your Visitors

Graphic Style

Getting the right sort of visitors to your website is one thing, keeping them there is another. An average user will make a decision to stay or leave in the first 10 seconds. Your site has to look good, feel right and download quickly. The graphical style of your site will be judged by most visitors, yet design tastes are subjective, so a balance must reached between form and function, with the scales tipping in the favour of function.

Many business owners want their sites to be as eye-catching as possible. They think that by including a lot of flashy graphics and nifty animation effects, they'll capture their visitors' attention. That may be true, but these special effects can also distract visitors from what you really want them to focus on: the value of your product.

Never confuse eye-candy with content. Graphics should only ever be used to support the main purpose of your site: to get people to buy what you have to sell. Too much visual clutter looks unprofessional and can ruin your credibility. Anything that distracts visitors from your copy can lose you sales.

You also don't want to chase your visitors away with long, unnecessary Flash presentations and splash pages. If your customers have to spend too much time trying to figure out how to stop your Flash presentation so they can get through to the "meat" of your site, they'll be gone, most likely never to return.

Believe it or not, studies have shown that most first-time visitors spend only 10 seconds on a site before deciding whether or not it offers any value for them. You don't want to waste these precious seconds with a pointless splash page or distracting animation.

The best way to drive sales is to design a simple, clean site using a careful balance of colours and style. Avoid using coloured or patterned backgrounds - they can make it difficult to read your sales copy. Also be sure to keep your link colours and format consistent.

At TMG we provide a design service that can enhance the look and feel of your site with the specific aim of getting more people to your site, getting them to stay longer, and creating more sales.

Navigation

If a site visitor cannot find a specific page, product, or piece of information within 3 clicks of their mouse then your website navigation needs to be improved. Often governed by unconscious rules, site navigation is a mix of organisation, guidance, intuition, and psychology. When it comes to navigation, consistency is the key.

The best way to deal with your navigation is to make it simple and obvious. It might seem boring and unoriginal, but that's the point. People don't want to have to spend time figuring out how to make their way through your site—they want it to be easy to understand. Otherwise, they'll go somewhere else to find what they're seeking.

Avoid confusing navigation. Some designers like to show off their skills by creating new and different ways to navigate through a multipaged site. Sometimes they hide links beneath icons or images, so that users can't find the links unless they mouse over the graphics. This certainly doesn't help people find what they're looking for.

Other designers put their navigation bars in different places on each page of the site, or change the look of the navigation bar itself, which can be awfully confusing. Navigation bars are like traffic signs: They have to be consistent and easily understandable to be effective.

Useability

Remember, if you really want to be successful online, you have to develop a site that serves the needs of your visitors in a user-friendly fashion. Web surfers are impatient people! They don't want to spend a lot of time trying to find what they're seeking on your site. According to market research done by the Garner Group, more than 50 percent of all Web sales are lost because site visitors can't find what they're looking for.

If you've buried important information too deep within your site, you're losing out on more than half of your sales!

A Web site should be like a newspaper story. All the really important information about your site—what you're selling and how it benefits people—should be the first thing your visitors see. That's the best way to capture their attention and get them to read more.

If you have only 10 seconds to grab your visitors' interest, don't make them waste time scrolling down your homepage or clicking through to deeper pages. People don't want to take any extra time to find out what you're offering—you have to provide it to them right up front. Don't make them look for it; hit them between the eyes with it!

Form and Function

Web sites are organic things, they should grow and adapt with your business. You should continually assess your site to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Form and function must work together to produce an effective site. There's no point having a beautiful looking site if your users can't use it.

Avoid developing your site so that it becomes over complicated. "The more, the better," is not the case, at least when it comes to web site design. Studies have shown that 30 to 60 percent of visitors drop off with each click they're made to take. Your site has to be as streamlined as possible if you want it to reach its true potential.

As your site grows, try to reduce the number of pages wherever possible. If you're selling 10 or less products, include them on your homepage. Why make visitors click through to a separate "Products" page to see what you have to offer? Remember, every click loses sales! If you can't feature all your products on your home page, group them in categories and display each category of products on its own page, instead of including a separate page for each product.

Don't forget, you have only 10 seconds to grab people's attention. The longer visitors have to wait for your site to load, the less likely they are to stick around and find out about your products or services.

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