A commercial website is your virtual business residence; it's your online headquarters. If you want to reach the maximum number of visitors and sell to as many people as possible; it's important to practice good web design principles to make sure your site is successful.
Many of the people who manage websites aren't aware of the many pitfalls awaiting them when they decide to become web marketers. There is more to a website than meets the eye.
The most important principle of web design best practices is knowing what components to use on your website and how to ensure browser compatibility.
With the new bells and whistles being introduced to make your web experience more enjoyable, it's hard to know what to use and how to use it properly. Here are eight tips for ensuring that your website is up to speed.
1.) Optimize the images on your website. They make your site load very slowly. Be sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
2.) 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 will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
3.) The website navigation menu should be clear and easy to follow so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion. Have clear directions on the navigation of your website.
4.) Make sure your website complies to web standards at http://www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
5.) Watch the use of scripts on your web pages. Too many scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.
6.) Use Cascading Style Sheets to develop your web content; they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.
7.) If you want to have professional web designers build your site, be prepared to spend quite a bit of money to get the job done right. Start with a good professional web template to keep costs down. You can buy WC3 standard templates and contact freelancers to work on your website. That will speed up the process of design and production. You can choose freelance designers from many online sources.
8.) You could design the website yourself with the help of WYSIWYG software, (what you see is what you get) such as Microsoft Frontpage, HotCoffee, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on. If you do, remember to view the website on several different computers and on several browsers. Be careful when creating your own site. If you are new and inexperienced, have a professional do the finishing touches to ensure smooth operation of your site for years to come.