Internet Marketing: 6 Rules of Thumb of Web Design

Before you can actually start earning from internet, it is recommended to have own your own website before you can start earning money. Now a day there are many cheap and reliable website hosting out there, try search in Google top 10 web hosting to get some idea. Basically it only cost you around $ 4~$ 10 per month, the one that I using is JustHost.com which only cost me around $ 2.96 per month for 2 years! Please read my previous post regarding web hosting for more information and tips.

Ok, now let go to the main point, when it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are six important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

6) Minimize your site loading time

For sure there will be a lot of image inside your web content (decoration image, picture, and etc bla bla) if not it will be very boring to read a website that purely words. If you got broadband access to the internet, it’s easy to forget that you’re actually in the minority in the world, out there still a lot of 56k dialup internet users. If the image files in your website too big, those 56k dialup users sure will fall into loading hell, for sure they will just click on ‘Back’ button and away from your website.

There are some image optimizer software which you can use it to reduce your images size at the same time maintain the images quality. Use those tools to reduce your web images size in order to speed up the loading time of your website.

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