Today I will be giving 5 easy tips on how to make your website effective. These tips don’t require any technical skills; they just touch on general best practices to follow.
- The first step in making your website effective is to identify what you wish to accomplish with the website, and build the homepage around that. The homepage is what really needs to sell what you are trying to do, and you need to display that information front and center. For best results, put only the most important information on the homepage and limit any fluff content.
- Make the website easy on the eyes. Too many times, websites get ruined from a poor color scheme selection, or it is just too flashy. You don’t want to distract your visitors from the reason that they are on your website to begin with. So avoid colors that make it hard to read the website or give you a headache looking at it.
- Keep a consistent feel throughout your website. While the homepage should be unique, the pages that follow should have a similar feel. This gives your website a more professional look too! Also keep your website structured. Information on your website should be structured and easy to follow along to
- Make navigation easy to use. People viewing your site should be able to identify what each page in your navigation is for. A page on your navigation bar named About Us should lead the person viewing your website to a page that talks about who your company is and what you strive to do. You should not hide information on that page that logically does not belong there.
- Be careful with media content such as music and videos. Unless you’re in a band or a music group, you should avoid putting music on your website altogether. With videos, do not make videos auto play on their own. These are things that annoy visitors on your website, and should be avoided. An example that can show you how true this is, just think back to when MySpace was real big. If you were visiting a friend’s page, the first thing you probably did was try to find out how to shut off or mute their music. People visiting your website will not want to put up with that, and will simply leave the site.
There are many other ways to make your website effective, but these 5 are a good start to get you on your way. If you aren’t sure whether or not you should put something on your website, put yourself in the position of the person viewing your website. How will they react? Find some friends to give you second and third opinions as well. Let them go through your website and get feedback from them. They may offer insight about whether or not things feel right with it.
I hope that you find this article helpful for your own web projects!
