Five Keys To Effective Website Design

by Compiled by GymLink.com.au (Health & Fitness Resource)

Developing an effective website takes focus and a clear set of goals. Launch your successful site by following some basic guidelines:

1. Define the Goals of Your Site � Before You Start Designing
Before you engage a website design company, you should take the time to outline the goals you have for your site.

Are you an e-tailer whose goal is to sell across three lines of business? Are you a professional services organisation looking to generate enquiries and build your marketing database through article downloads? Or are you an entertainment site primarily seeking return visitors in order to generate pay-per-click advertising revenues?

Be sure to outline the goals for your site clearly, so that the designer knows what is, and isn't, important to you as a business owner.

Be realistic � you cannot be successful if you have ten goals for your home page � the impact will be lost and visitors will not engage.

2. Know Your Audience
It may seem an obvious question, but who are you trying to attract to your site?

Effective websites are designed to meet the needs of the visitor; if you don't have a good idea of who your typical visitor is/might be, you have a real challenge ahead of you.

If you are a new business, do research on your industry and see who your competitors are selling to; if you are an established business and are just going online, ask your customers for feedback on their preferences.

3. Ensure that Your Site has Clean, Intuitive Architecture
Your site may start small; in fact, you may never develop a site with more than 20 pages. Nonetheless, when planning your site think about how you want your website to work five years from now.

Make sure that you have set up a framework that will allow you to achieve that five year goal.

When you build a house, you make the doors wide enough to accommodate furniture. Building a site with an architecture that allows you to "furnish it" properly is a must.

What does this mean in a practical sense? Develop a hierarchy for product pages. For example, if you are a food business, you might want to organise your product pages into folders by food group, or by country (i.e., desserts or Italian specialties). If you offer a professional service, maybe personal training, you may want to have your articles in a master folder ("content") with sub-folders based on content ("get the most out of your PT session" or "exercise tips"). Displaying related content and cross-linking within your site will make for a richer user experience.

4. Make the Call to Action CLEAR and COMPELLING
Are you developing an e-commerce site? If you want people to buy your products, you need to make sure that they: 1) can select products and services and get them into the shopping cart easily, 2) that they can access/view their shopping cart at any point during their visit, and 3) that they have a clear path to a simple and quick checkout process once they are ready to give you their money.

In order to facilitate these actions, your web designer needs to: create a user-friendly interface with visible "buying cues"; a cart which allows users to make modifications (adjust quantities, add/subtract items); and one which lets them know where they are in the checkout process.

5. Make Your Site SEO Friendly
If you have purchased the right SEO-friendly domain name(s), a skilled designer can help to create a page with content and metadata, which will help to earn you ranking on your key terms in the major search engines.

These days - if you don't have a website, you're not in business! We wish the lots of success with your website.