Here we have included some useful site design tips.
If you would like to receive a personal quote from us for your site
design, just fill out the form below, or
and we will get back with you to address your specific
design needs.
Many factors need to be considered when designing
your web site. And although you may be able to put a simple site together
on your own, it is usually best to leave to the more technical design
to the experts.
The reason I say this is because while on one hand
you want to have an interesting site, on the other hand you can't have
a site that is slow to load. Surfers are impatient folks and if your
site takes too long to load, they will click away.
The key here is to strike a balance.
A good designer can optimize your site design to
keep load times down while still making it an interesting place to visit.
This can be done by keeping graphics small and to a minimum. You can
make your pages appear to have more graphics than they really do by
using a colored bullet to set off (and draw attention to) key points
in the text, and by using colored boxes and text that will load instantly.
A good designer will also compress your graphics. This further reduces
the loading time, without a loss of image quality. Repeating these graphic
throughout your site will keep your pages loading fast, since once an
image is loaded into the visitors computer it doesn't have to reload.
Brad Miner at minergrafx.com
does phenomenal graphic design, and is the head of our design team.
Check-out his site for all kinds of cool graphics that he has available,
or have him custom design something for you.
Another important factor in site design is interactivity.
Too many sites are just boring "brochures" ...z z z z z. Others
go over board with bells and whistles ...auggghhh!
Once again you need to strike a balance.
Only use interactive features that are of benefit
to your visitors. Remember most surfers are looking for information.
Have your designer include functions that can help your visitors find
that information. Like a search engine for your site and or the www.
If you can take the time to personally interact
with your visitors, have your designer install a chat room on your site
(be sure to post the times you will be available answer questions or
discuss issues).
If you don't have an hour or so each week to regularly
meet with visitors in a chat room, then have your designer install a
bulletin board that visitors can post to. Remember to check your board
frequently for new posts. Make sure your designer includes capabilities
for you to block the IP's of obnoxious posters. In addition we typically
block certain offensive words when we design a site for a client and
then we show them how they can simply edit the list of words they wish
to prohibit.
Auto-responders are a definite must if you want
to provide quick response to your visitors inquiries and still have
time to work on the other aspects of your business. They are "infobots"
that will automatically retrieve a file and mail it to a visitor who
has "requested info" by sending an email to a specific address
made available in a mailto link. I'm sure that no matter how much information
you make available to your customers many will ask the same questions...over
and over again! You simply pre-write your responses to the most common
questions and "point to the files" with autoresponders.
Forms for gathering and supplying data are important
too. Order taking is streamlined while sales are increased by giving
more options to your customer. When a prospect is ready to buy, it's
time to make the sale! If they are surfing late at night you don't want
them to have to wait until 9:00 AM to place their order because by then
they may have found someone else READY to make the sale. Another interactive
way to get more visitors to your site is with a Tell-A-Friend
form.
Fill-in boxes should abound on your site. We repeat
the sign-up box for our newsletter on every single page because we have
found that fill-in boxes have a much higher response rate than mailto
links! But don't leave those mailto links out either, they are important
because there ARE those who prefer not to have to fill in the blanks.
You can have your designer make it easy for your prospect to send a
mail that includes the subject matter by adding "?subject=Whatever
you want the subject line to read" without the quotes directly
after the email address in the mailto link.
to get a FREE personal quote on website design.
