Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Website Design

Some websites are set up to dazzle you. There is music, innovative graphics, wonderfully programmed flash components, and fancy navigation bars that change cursors and popup all sorts of surprises.

Unfortunately, unless you're selling a trip to the Northpole or an amusement park you may want to limit the dazzle components in lieu of a more serious business site.

Certainly you want a unique, up to date site but your main design components should not include a lot of flash. Flash can be a trial for older machines and browsers and it can make it difficult and impossible for search engines to crawl your site.

Then there are the components like music and video that automatically start and/or can't be turned off; minor or major annoyances depending where your customer is observing your site. Give your customers a choice of whether or not to play music or video and make sure the page has controls for each.

And, finally, navigation is so important and should never leave the customer guessing.  You want your customer to be able to navigate your site without tripping in the aisle. This is an area where simplicity is best;  leave your fancy programming for other page components.

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