A website needs to succeed on many levels to be able to entice the target market to your business. Without a professional approach, your website has very little chance to establish itself on the Internet and stick to visitors’ memory. Besides, content is the key element. Upon having poor content, you give no reason to your visitors to stay long on the site. Keep in mind that people need to see what you offer. With the lack of reasons to return, they might never have an interest to visit your website again.

Catch your visitors’ attention. You’ve got literally five seconds to impress your potential customers. That’s absolutely right, only five seconds. It’s not long enough for a visitor to read the content and understand the message that you try to convey on your site. However, it’s enough for them to emotionally react to the layout, design, colour and navigation. If you failed to catch people’s attention by then, they will click away from your website and probably will never come back again.

Smart web designers use various elements such as rotating images and catchy slogans to catch visitors’ attention. Fonts, activities, images, everything should appeal to the visitor who you’re trying to reach out. Besides, relevance is important. If your website provides funeral services, vivid colours would definitely look stupid and inappropriate. If your website is supposed to target teenagers, washed-out colours are not advisable at all.

There are a lot of nuances that should be taken into account when designing a website. Those companies that are selling high-priced products need a lot of space to look spacious and rich when discount websites do well with crowded web designs. That’s the reason why it’s important to find a qualified web designer who understands the concept of your business and its objectives.

Stickiness is another important element that a professional web developer needs to incorporate in web design. The term “stickiness” belongs to technical jargon. That’s basically the techniques that are used to keep your visitors on a website. Ideally, you need to retain your visitors for at least a few minutes. Otherwise, they won’t get an idea of what you offer.

According to various research, a lot of people don’t buy on the early visits. Today a lot of people use a website to research before making a decision whether to buy or not a product in a real life store. Others use websites to compare the prices and quality. Therefore, you need to give your visitors good reasons to return to your website. Remember about importance of the first impression! You’ve got a few seconds only!

The key element to direct success of a website is navigation. Website navigation is a certain gateway to different sections of the content, and there are certain tips by following which you can design it in the most effective way.

1) Navigation should be placed on a prominent area. Naturally, web users are very impatient and they won’t hang out on a website for ages to find the needed piece of information. Navigation has to be obvious and clear. Since it shouldn’t take a lot of space on the site, it’s got to attract attention and stand out from the rest of the elements so that they aren’t lost amongst a sea of the content. The most common place where a visitor expects to see a navigation bar is the top side of the website. Besides, it’s very convenient allocation as users don’t have to scroll down the page to be able to navigate further in your website.

2) Keep it consistent. If you’ve allocated your navigation bar across the top side of the site, make sure it appears in the same place through the entire website. It should also be in the same colors, type and style. By keeping your website consistent you will enable your users to get used to your site and feel comfortable there.

3) The names of sections should be obvious. They have to clearly say what lies behind them. The words such as “tools” and “resources” should be avoided wherever it’s possible, because as a rule they only lead to users clicking multiple unnecessary buttons.The words “news” and “podcasts” would look more understandable and comprehensive on the site.

4) Less is more. Having plenty of buttons that lead to many sections of the content leave a user with too many choices. A lot of options can simply distract your visitor from the important content areas of your site. Be very careful with navigation bars. If you have three separate navigation bars on the site, it’s already quite a lot.

5) Make sure you remind your visitor where he is. It’s a really good idea to highlight the section where a visitor has come in. Be consistent and use the same colours and style to do that. If your website has got more than one page for each content section, make sure that you’ve got a button which users could click to get back to the homepage.

It appears that it’s easy to create a hideous website as well as it can be easy even with little design experience to create a professional-looking, clear and attractive website. Is there any secret key to creating a successful website design? Well, actually, it’s much simpler. By eliminating certain features that usually make a page look revolting, even a novice web designer can create a nice web project. In this article I’m going to list some of those features that spoil the entire website look. Besides, keep in mind that eliminating of these bad features will not only make your website look more professional and attractive but also more user-friendly and functional.

The list of these features is based on the ideas collected from various group of people around the country. If you have your personal opinions, you are welcome to share them with us in the comments below.

Backgrounds. The usage of default grey color is considered to be a bad practice. The combinations of color and text where background color makes a reading process a real daunting task should not be used. It’s recommended to be very careful with choosing backgrounds so that they don’t look busy and don’t distract visitors from the content.

Text. Too small or too big text usually looks confusing and not attractive. The whole paragraphs of type in bold or italic or all in caps won’t have a positive impact on the visitors. Don’t underline the text that is not a proper link.

Links. Broken links as well as unclear ones will definitely put your website down in the eyes of your customers. If you’re not going to underline your links, at least make it obvious where a user has to click. Don’t make your potential customers wander around the site with a mouse checking every randomly colored word.

Graphics. The usage of meaningless graphics won’t impress your visitors even if you personally like the picture a lot. Don’t use too big graphics that take ages to load. Remember that people get really frustrated with those websites that give a slow response. Check your site for the broken or missing images. Don’t slip up over such dorky things.

Navigation. If your navigation is too complicated, the site will be able to attract only a scarce amount of visitors. It’s pointless to use the titles that don’t explain what web page is about. Make darned sure you have no pages that stay apart from all the rest without any identification. There have to be links back to where a visitor came from.

General characteristics. The layouts with non-standard-sized home pages or entry pages are very inconvenient to view and use, therefore it’s better to stick to standard window sizes. The web page looks confusing without a focal point. The same can be said about the page with too many focal points. Make sure that your website looks good in all major browsers.

It’s not such an easy job to create a good web design because it has to perform a lot of functions. A proper web design is supposed to be usable and nice-looking to capture the eye of a visitor. Besides, it has to deliver the required information and illustrate the brand of the company. The emergence of self-taught web designers implicitly leads to frequent changes in the web design concept. However, there are some essential principles that stay put. I will share with you some of my observations but yet, keep in mind that rules are created to be broken.

Precedence

A good web design is all about information and the best tool to highlight the important message on a site is precedence. On coming to a good web design, a user should be easily guided around the screen. Different parts of your web design are expected to have different visual weight. For example, logo is usually the first thing that catches the eye of a user. The reason for that is its distinctive location on a site (top-left) and obviously its size. And that’s a good thing because you want your users to know what site they’ve come to. But precedence is needed further on as well. You might want your visitors to go from one part of the site to another one in the sequence of importance. Thus, to achieve such precedence you can use the following design tools:

• position – an element which determines in which order a user is going to perceive the information;
• color – the choice of color basically draws people’s attention to the important bits of the content;
• size – surely, big elements attract more attention than little ones;
• design elements – if you place a huge exclamation sign on a web page or an arrow pointing at certain message, your users will definitely look in the right direction.

Spacing

Some web designers believe that it’s important to fill all the spacing on the site to leave no blank fields. But actually, that’s a bad practice. Spacing makes things much more coherent and lucid. There are three types of spacing used in web design:

• Line spacing. When you publish the content, spacing between the lines determines how readable the text would be. Too much as well as too little space can make the reading process a real daunting task. Therefore, it’s important to find the most suitable medium to provide website visitors with well-readable content.
• White space. White space is the term that refers to any empty space on the site. It is used to give the balance, contrast and proportion to the page. A lot of white space can make things look more elegant and prestigious on the site. Go through a magazine and pay attention to the way the ads are laid out there.
• Padding. Text shouldn’t touch other elements on the website. Here’s a very simple rule to follow – always leave space between text and the rest of the elements.

Navigation

One of the most frustrating practice is to come to the site and get disoriented as to where you are and where to go there. Website navigation can either make or break the site. The navigation  buttons should be prominent and well described so that a user can easily and comfortably navigate through the site.

Do you still have no account with Myspace? In that case you’re definitely missing something big out. People around the world have experienced incredible benefits of using this popular social networking site. It’s got unbelievable capacity which tempts and attracts business owners and corporate organizations. A big number of people has got a great tool to make their websites as attractive and impressive as they like. It’s as easy as to customize a personal user page. In these latter days custom Myspace designs have become the latest trend in the virtual designing world which gains more and more popularity from day to day.

Is it possible to do it yourself?

Ask this question first. There is a number of tools which has been developed for Myspace followers. These tools are used to create a nice, personalized and unique look of their account. If you are creative enough or if you’ve got a certain level of expertise on how utilize these tools, you can always go for them and customize your online presence yourself. However, if you don’t feel comfortable using these tools or you do lack creativity, there is a number of available web design companies that work with custom myspace designs at affordable prices. Professional help is definitely needed if you lack technical skills but you want to have a presentable and attractive myspace account.

Promotion

If the goal of your Myspace account is to promote things online, it should look really professional. Creativity and identity factors should not be neglected whilst thinking of the concept for your account design. With a professional approach you would know for a fact that the output is going to exceed all expectations. The design should be relevant to the business field and reflect its nature so that people can follow you and clearly see your objectives.

Navigation

Easy navigation should be provided by all means. Otherwise, your online business presence will fail to succeed. The navigation system is expected to be coherent and simple so that even first time users could navigate through web pages without getting confused.