effective website design

Effective website design is more than the visual experience when visiting your website. Good web design is a well organized, easy to navigate, informative and visually engaging site that is both user friendly and search engine friendly. Many aspects of good website design cannot be seen in the website itself but relate to the infrastructure or architecture of the website.

User Friendly Design
A recent study revealed that visitors to a website decide in the first 7-10 seconds if they will spend more time on a website. Your site needs to convey that it is informative, easy to navigate and current in those first few seconds. While a graphically interesting and engaging design will help keep visitors, another study revealed that most visitors are more interested in current, easy to read and find information related to their search.

Ease of Navigation
Seems easy enough, make the website easy to move from page to page. However, this can be challenging for sites with a lot of information or a number of topics. Also, as many as 30% of business websites have pages that are dead links, meaning the pages do not go to the intended information, or have "under construction" pages. This is one of the fastest ways to lose a visitor and portray an image of being out of date, incomplete, or not a priority. That impression transfers to your overall business, not just your website.

Search Engine Friendly Design
A search engine sends out a program often called a spider, crawler or robot. This program crawls through your website and determines the content and overall structure of your website. In fact, quite a bit of information is gathered from the crawler and put into the search engine's database. This data is then used to determine your ranking for specific search terms. Making it easy for a spider to crawl and index your site is critical to performing well. Learn more about search engine friendly design techniques here.

Web Design Image offers a free analysis and evaluation of your current website and it's effectiveness. Contact us today to get your free evaluation, a $250 value.