Easy Steps to Improve Your Website

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by James Youngblood

Every website should be designed to achieve a basic goal. If you follow a few easy rules, you will increase the changes of achieving that goal.

1) Avoid the use of splash pages

Splash pages may look nice but they are likely to cause the reader to head for another site before they even find out what you are offering. Busy surfers want information and may move on from the splash page to other straight to the point sites.

2) Banner advertisements can be distracting

Most surfers ignore banner ads because they are so prevalent on the internet. A more effective approach to advertising is to include links in the body of your articles. Your words should entice them to seek more information and lead them to make the decision to click on your well placed links.

3) Your site should be easy to navigate

Make it easy for your visitors to move from page to page on your site. Do not use complicated or hard to understand menu systems. Readers have little patience if they get lost and will quickly leave your site.

4) Let your visitor know where they are

It is easy to get lost on any website unless there are sign posts to guide one along the way. Make sure your guests know which part of your site they are in on every page. Don’t let them get lost or confused because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Video and audio may be useful but use them wisely

Use sound carefully. Tastes vary, and you need to make sure not to annoy your potential customers with unwanted audio. If you believe audio will improve your site by all means use it but provide some easy to find control over it — volume or muting controls. Nothing makes me hit the exit button faster than sound blasting at me when a page loads! Videos usually have to be started by the viewer. You may want to use the same technique with sound.

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