Ask 10 different people and you’ll get 10 different answers, but the truth is that both design and function are vital to having a successful web site. In fact, the two are inseparable when it comes to web site design, and achieving the right balance between the two is the key to creating a successful web site.

Why is Good Design Important?

Regardless of what anyone tells you, looks are important. Image means everything especially in the business world. Imagine going to a restaurant and being served by people in dirty, torn clothes. The food might be great, but people will be reluctant to eat there based on the staff’s appearance.

The basic function of design is to communicate. It says something about you to your customers, which is why good design is so important in today’s competitive marketplace. Since the visual appeal of your web site is so important, you can’t be haphazard about picking colors, graphics and layout choices. The message you want to send your customers has to be carefully planned out before you even think about writing a line of code.

Why is Functionality Important?

Using our restaurant example, imagine walking into a beautiful building with fancy decor, and not being able to find your way to your table. The maze of hallways may be tastefully adorned, but what purpose does it serve if customers can’t do business with you?

The same applies to your web site. Beautiful graphics, colors and animations are fine, as long as they don’t hinder your customers’ ability to navigate the site and conduct business.

What Can Go Wrong?

The most successful web sites marry design and function so well that customers don’t even think about it while they’re using the site - they’re just doing business.

Web sites fail when they’re out of balance. A web designer that tries to be clever or artistic is putting craft over usability. While graphics can add visual appeal, and even encourage users to delve more deeply into the site, they should never exist without providing some benefit to the customer. Don’t use graphics just because they look cool.

The same holds true for functionality. You might think it’s clever to make people run the cursor all over the page just to find the lines, but what you’re really doing is making the experience more confusing and frustrating. We live in a world with millions of online choices for web consumers, making a site difficult to use for the sake of art is like putting up a ‘Closed’ sign on your business’ front door. Likewise for the site’s layout. Creating a maze because it hasn’t been done before might win you an award for creativity, but if the customers can’t easily navigate to do business, then your award will be your reward, and that’s all.

If you’ve never put together a business web site before, you should consider hiring a professional web designer to assist you. Find one that understands the importance of visual appeal and functionality, and take a look at their past work. Go through their web site portfolio. Did the design jump out at you? Did you notice how easy it was to use? If you answered yes, then it’s likely because the web site is functioning the way it should - without drawing attention to itself.

Remember: Things work well when they’re in balance. It’s the way of life. When things are out of balance, chaos ensues. And that’s the last thing you want for your business web site.

Here is an great video on Web 2.0. that you will enjoy.

Squeeze pages are generally web pages that stand alone to be used as a landing page for a special marketing campaign or offer. These pages usually offer the visitor some information in exchange for their email address or other contact information.

The ultimate goal of these sites is to take the visitor’s information and use it to turn them into paying customers sometime in the future.

Important things to remember

It’s recommended that a squeeze page stand alone rather than act as a home page for your site or any other site. Because they contain such little content, these pages can impede the indexing of a website and the overall page rankings.

Your squeeze page is meant to do one thing — get a customer’s information. Because of that, you’ll want to make sure that there are no other distractions — like links to other sites — that might steer them away before they’ve completed their task.

When choosing a domain name for your squeeze page you should get one that’s close to the name of your giveaway. For example if you’re offering a free report on How to Get Traffic to Your Website you should try for a domain like: getmoretraffic.com.

What you should give away

Although your give-away is just a means to get people to give you their email addresses, it still needs to be something of value to them. It should be something that helps them with a major challenge they’re currently facing like getting more traffic to their web site.

Information products like ebooks, white papers, special reports and audio courses are all great ways to give the person something that’s valuable in exchange for their information.

People will gladly give out their email address for free information that helps them conquer a specific problem.

Following up

The ultimate goal of your squeeze page is to turn visitors into paying customers and the best way to stay in touch with them is by using autoresponders. You can create different messages to be sent out every few weeks after someone has downloaded the free information in your offer.

These messages can be set up to read something like: Since you enjoyed our free report on Getting More Traffic to Your Web Site, you might want to subscribe to our monthly newsletter that provides tips on ecommerce.

With the right offer and the right squeeze page you can develop a huge list of leads to market future products and offers to.