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Great web design is vital to your website’s success. If the website design is effective, it would increase traffic to the site and also improve sales. On the other hand, a bad design can hinder website usage despite exceptional products and service. Keep in mind the following points while you design your site if you want it to be successful:

Top 10 Dos of Great Website Design

1. Do provide convenient search and navigation capabilities. Your website design should promote quick and easy search of required information. Each web page must have all pertinent links to enhance customer visiting experience and satisfaction. Any useful information should not be more that two or three clicks away else you risk losing the user. You would ensure repeat visits from your customers if you save them time by providing fast navigation and speedy access to information they are looking for.

2. Do keep your website content simple and easy to understand. All content on the site must be clear and easy to understand else you risk losing the user’s attention. develop content such that it keys in on customer problems and offers efficient solutions to them.

3. Do give your site a consistent look and feel. Creating a consistent look and feel for your whole website through the use of similar fonts, colors and layouts is a must to give it a professional look. Linked pages especially should use consistent font styles, graphics and colors.

4. Do make your site accessible on multiple browsers. Users may visit your website using many different web browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer or Chrome. Increasingly large number of users are browsing web sites on the mobile phones. It may make sense to test the site for access on mobile web browsers.

5. Do include your contact information on every page.

Though you can put your address on the ‘Contact Us’ page, be sure to put your phone number and email address on every page to give a mature and professional look to your site.

6. Do ensure that each page has the most relevant information at the top of the page so that the user knows precisely what the page is about and if they want to scroll down or not.

7. Do use high-quality pictures and graphics. Keep a good balance between the image resolution and time to load them. High quality graphics will invite users but would be a turn off if they take too long to load.

8. Do use bullets, icons, boldface and italicized words, color and headline to draw customer attention to important segments of your content.

9. Do understand that security of the web site is important and generates confidence. Make your website secure for visitors. Privacy policy also needs to be readily available to the users.

10. Do use clear and concise page titles. Customers see web page title in search results and clear effective titles can considerably increase the traffic coming to your website.

Top 10 Don’ts of Great Website Design

1. Don’t clutter up your web pages with too much information or they become hard to read and navigate. Build a new page for each separate topic, product or product category. If you plan to place advertisement on the site, make sure it is not intrusive or you would lose the visitors.

2. Don’t make unnecessary use of bandwidth consuming audio and video features, such as graphics, animations and photos. These may be slow to download and are aggravating if the customer has to wait too long for them.

3. Don’t make content hard to read by using offbeat text fonts or color combination. Also limit the number of distracting visual on the site.

4. Don’t add any information or features to the site that do not serve the intended purpose of the site. Adding content and features on your website that don’t carry any meaning for visitors is a waste of time and bandwidth.

5. Don’t let the content of the links get stale. Periodically refresh the content and update the links to relevant information. Outdated links are annoying and can seriously affect your business reputation.

6. Don’t use jargon or overly technical terms on your pages unless your website is designed for a small segment of technical people. Moreover, do not use conflicting information in your site. In addition to confusing customers, such information gives a highly negative and unprofessional image to your website.

7. Don’t use flashing icons and text as that can distract browsers and prove detrimental to the popularity of your website.

8. Don’t stuff up your web pages with advertisements. Also, keep a check on pop-ups as they can irritate shoppers.

9. Don’t include introductory advertisements on the first page before your web content is displayed. Such advertisements put customers in a sore mood even before they see your content.

10. Don’t just brag about your company’s achievements. Offer your users easy to consume information and back it up with references and customer success stories to permit them to judge your performance.

Follow the dos and stay away from the don’ts to design an effective website, and greatly boost the probability of successful web entrepreneurship. - Daljeet Sidhu is the author of this article.