How to Design a Professional Website for Your Business

If you intend to create a business website, you should keep the requirements of your website visitors in mind. This is to ensure that your website visitors enjoy visiting your website and stay longer. The longer they stay, the higher the chances that they would buy something or perform some other desirable activity.

Following are a few considerations for designing professional websites:

Fast Loading
Your website should load in 10 to 20 seconds on a dial up connection. For this purpose, the size of your web pages should be no more than 50 KB. This can be achieved if you optimize your graphics, or have minimum graphics on your web pages.

Navigation
The navigation of your website should be clear and consistent. Create a template for your website with a navigation menu containing important links, and use this template for all the web pages of your website. This would ensure that you have the same navigation menu in the entire website, and your website visitors would not be confused.

Compatible
Your website should be compatible with all the major browsers in the market. Most noteworthy browsers are Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. These browsers can be downloaded for free from their websites. You can install both these browsers in your computer and view your site through them, to check if it is compatible.

Flash, Frames, Animations, Doorway pages
Flash presentations, animations, frames and doorway pages are not recommended for professional websites, as they highly interfere with the browsing experience and do not offer any real value or information to a website visitors. Please try to avoid using them in your business website.

Easy to read text
Use fonts that are easy to read. Do not use script fonts or italics on your web page. The font should also be of a suitable size, and not too small. The most recommended fonts for web use are Arial and Verdana.

Use of color
Do not use very bright colors that hurt the eyes. Also avoid using a dark background and light colored text. It is best to use a light colored preferably white background with black or very dark colored text. Also do not use multiple colors for your website design or text. This gives a very unprofessional look to a website.

Screen resolution
If possible your website should look good on all screen resolutions. Try to avoid having a horizontal scrolling bar, as it makes the website difficult to navigate.
These are some of the rules for good website design. You must have a well designed website which is easy to browse and read, so that your visitors or prospects enjoy browsing it and are impressed with it.

By Cavyl Stewart (Source: http://www.hostlibrary.com)