Wednesday, 12 June 2013

Smart Website Design Principles for Sticky Pages

By Regina Ng


An excellent website design does not always mean expensive or fancy - it just has to have proper design principles and elements in it that makes for a good user experience. Think about what you do - when you hit a website as a first time visitor, what do you think about or feel? We all take note of the site design, even if we are not actually thinking those words, "What is this site design all about?". So if you want to make the right first impression and ensure that your visitors stay longer on your site, then it's important that you focus on getting the smallest design elements right on your website. We cannot discuss all aspects of site design, but here are just a couple that you need to think about in relation to your site.

Proper Graphics: There should be absolutely no inconsistency when it comes to the graphics of your website, make sure you size/define all the graphics and images on your site correctly. Doing this allows you to completely optimize the design of your website so that it performs well and is better than the others out there. The fact is, webpages that contain the right kind of graphics, which are highly consistent, will allow them to load quicker. Well defined graphics enhance the look and the performance of the website, which makes it work seamlessly across all browsers. When your images are sized well, your loading time and workload will be much easier for your browser to handle.

RSS Auto-Discovery: Every webmaster who offers an RSS feed for their websites (which should be every person reading this article) needs to include the code for auto-discovery in their header. This will let all of the different web browsers and RSS readers detect your feed automatically and let people know that it is there for them. RSS feeds are a popular way to distribute content to your readers and update them about changes on your site, so adding this small feature to your site will make a big difference.

The alt tags are beneficial to use for several reasons, and we recommend you use them. We are referring to any person with impaired vision, plus the alt tags are good for a little more on-page SEO benefit. Not using the alt tag will not doom your SEO efforts, so it is mainly for those with vision problems. If you do not optimize for search, then it is still a great idea for vision impaired people. Write a quick little blurb that tells what is in the picture. So do not just do this for one or two graphics but all of them.

Use Alternate Domains: In order to protect your brand and ensure that your website is found by your target audience, you should register alternate domain names or multiple versions of your domain name with various extensions. This protects you against other people who will want to take advantage of your success with similar domain names. It's not really related to your website design but take this step anyway so that you won't accidentally lose any valuable readers. All you do then is re-direct all of your domain names to the main site--an act that is often done by bigger companies who want to protect their brand and raise awareness for their sites. For example, don't just limit yourself to the .com--you need the .org and .net as well so that you're covered in the three most popular extensions. This can help you limit the amount of competition in the search engines. Every little design element that you add to your website will in some way or the other contribute to the overall growth of your site, so make sure you're spending a good amount of time improving the web design of your site so that you're not only able to get new visitors, but also retain the old ones.




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