When designing a website for business purposes, avoid the temptation to become Michelangelo or Picasso. A good business website should not be an expression of you. If you want to express yourself, try writing a book or painting a picture. The rules I follow when designing a business website are function over form, good content, and easy navigation. If your website does not follow these simple rules, you should probably rethink your design. The following paragraphs will discuss in detail those three rules.
Form Over Function
Avoid flashy graphics on your website at all costs. Graphic intense websites tend to distract visitors. Many times these types of sites look really cool, but the visitor has no idea what message you are trying to convey. After the novelty of your cool graphics wears off (usually in 2 or 3 seconds), the visitor will leave your site and continue surfing the web to find the information, product, or service that you could very well have been able to provide. In addition to being a distraction, a flashy website can slow down the time it takes for your website to load on a visitor's monitor. If it takes more than a couple seconds for a visitor to load your website they will click away never to return. Just like in life, you only get one chance to make a first impression. If a visitor leaves your website before it even loads, it is going to be hard to nail that sell.
Content Is King
Make your website meaningful, be sure to provide important information about the product or service you are offering. You should get to the point fast because visitors are constantly being bombarded with useless information. Don't include information that is irrelevant to your website and be sure that your message clear.
A content rich website is import for search engine optimization (SEO). SEO determines how your site will be ranked in keyword search engine requests. When a search engine's web crawler looks at your website to determine its search ranking it is looking at the content of your site. Web crawlers used to rely on titles and keyword tags, however many website designers would load these tags with data that did not relate to the websites so the actual content of the site became far more important. A web crawler's job is to match the text provided in your site with the web surfer's search request.
Navigation
The rule I like to follow regarding navigation is that a visitor to your website should never have to click than mouse more than three times to move from any point in your website to any other point in your website. The best example I can think of is when you call a business and get one of those automated telephone operators. They ask you to press a number to go to a department, then you press another number to go to some group of that department, an so on and so on until you have pressed a different number about eight times and decided to give up on the call altogether. This is the feeling your visitors will get if you make them click the mouse several time to reach their destination. In many cases, they will never reach their destination because they will have left your website to find one that was better designed!
Theses are my rules to live by when designing an effective website.
