The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number Eight:
Understand how colour affects communication

The colours you use on your site can help you convey subtle meanings. How does colour affect us? Colours can portray positive or negative feelings. They affect our mood and will have an effect on our visitors as well because certain colours stir up certain emotions in our brains.

Warm and Cool Colours

Colours are either warm or cool. Orange, yellow and brown are warm colours. These colours are usually associated with fall. Warm colours convey cheerfulness and enthusiasm. Cool colours such as green, blue, pink and purple are peaceful and relaxing. They are more popular than warm colours.

The Use of Colours

You should choose colours based upon the type of effect you’d like to achieve. Here are some tips on choosing your overall colour scheme. In the next post, we’ll get into more specifics.

• Once you have chosen the colours for your site, use the same colours consistently throughout your site.
• Avoid using too many colours on your site as this will make your site look busy and confusing. Never use more colours than are necessary.
• Use light colours for backgrounds and darker colours for foreground text.
• Avoid using more than one dominant colour.
• Make sure the choice of colours for a site fits the intended content and the users’ expectations.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number Seven :
Faster Loading Pages

You only have a few seconds to get your web visitors attention. You’ve done this yourself – you’ve clicked on a link that has text which really interested you. You’re used to a certain amount of wait time, but if the page goes outside the time you’re used to waiting, you’ll click over to something else.

Web surfing is an intuitive procedure. As such, there are certain habits we all get into. We don’t care that ten years ago, we might be standing in line at a library, or a bookstore, or at a seminar, trying to access this same information. All we know that now, we expect to get it within seconds.

Therefore, knowing this, it’s your job to get your information to appear as quickly as possible – you need faster loading pages.

One way you can make your pages load faster, is to minimize the number and size of graphics on your pages. The default setting of a standard browser is constructed to load at most, four images at once. Also, smaller images don’t take as long to load. Of course, if you’ve already managed these two items, and you still can’t figure out why your pages won’t load faster, you probably need to ask a web site designer for help.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number Six:
Create Consistency

Your website visitors need to know how to get around, how to get back where they came from, and they also need to have cues that let them know when they’re still in your site and when they have left it.

Yes, it seems obvious, but as websites change over time and are updated, they have a tendency to lose consistency, unless it is part of the on-going plan. Here are some tips to make sure your site design stays consistent.

Use a consistent design for all pages on your site. The colours should be pleasing and the same colour scheme should be used throughout the site. Having a complex and confusing site will make people go away.

Also, use a consistent layout across your site. Having a consistent look on your site will eliminate confusion.

Have you been to a website only to find it hard to navigate? Many visitors find it difficult to locate information. Therefore, a lot of time is wasted trying to find the information visitors are looking for.

Navigation tells us at a glance about the contents of the site. It tells us how to use the site.

Once visitors arrive at your website, they should be able to navigate it easily without searching.

Menus/navigation bars should be in the same place on every page. Remember the three-click rule. Visitors should never be more than three-clicks away from the information they’re looking for. Make it easy for visitors to navigate by using simple and intuitive navigation.

You can create a professional presence by having a clear and simple navigation system.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number Five:
Avoid These Common Usability Mistakes

So what are these common usability mistakes?

One of the most common mistaks is building a site that does not appear to have a clear purpose. If you show your site to a novice internet user and they can’t figure out how to get around, you’ll want to review this issue.

Other common mistakes include:

• long scrolling pages (the skinnier the scrollbar, the closer you are to losing your audience),
• animated text (those tricks are for kids),
• dark backgrounds (they work on some “fun” sites, but not for businesses),
• long download times (how long does it take you to click away when a page doesn’t load?), and,
• outdated information (people expect the web to be fresh).

In short, a usable site will:

help users achieve a goal, usually to find something
make it easy for them to achieve that goal
make it possible to achieve the goal quickly
make achieving that goal a pleasant experience

Identifying problems with usability for your site need be no more complicated than asking a few friends to use your site and, if possible, watching them silently as they do this. Watching users try to find information on your site can be both instructive and quite revealing!

Not sure if your site measures up?

For a free consultation on your Web site usability, write to me at nina@interdream-designs.com, or click the link below to ask me a question.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number Four:
Making Your Web Site “Usable”

How usable is your site? To find out, first you need to know what usability is.

Usability assesses how easy user interfaces are as far as the functionality of your site. But it’s not just about making sure everything on the site works. You also want to be able to determine:

• how quickly visitors can use your site, and
• how easily visitors are able to make use of it

This should be the top priority in design because if a product is not usable, your visitors won’t respond to it. How useful a site is has a direct relationship to how profitable a site is, therefore usability should be top in your list of priorities for your site.

In a recent usability study of 9 top Web sites, most of some 70 test users could not find specific information they were instructed to find a majority of the time.

So how can you make your site usable?

A site will be generally usable if the content is relevant, easy to find, the web page is pleasant to look at and well designed. Web sites should be designed with the customers’ needs in mind – not the Web site owner’s needs. A site with good content, regardless of its subject, is one that provides information that is beneficial to users.

Clear and simple navigation that is consistent and does not confuse visitors contributes to making information easy to find. A good navigation system should answer the following questions:
1. Where am I?
2. Where have I been?
3. Where can I go?

Having clear text links on your site also helps in ease of use. We’ll pick up next time with common usability mistakes and ways to avoid them.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Design Secret Number Three:
How Web Design Can Factor Into Your Traffic Goals.

When you know what the function of your site is, you can use share that goal with your web designer, and get better results out of your design project. For example, if someone comes to me and tells me they want a standard ecommerce site, I am focused on particular things, to make it easier for a person who comes to that site to make a purchase, following a logical progression to a sale.

But if a person wants to be able to capture a lead before the new visitor is free to roam about the site, the design of the site is quite different.

Then we go back to the question of traffic. A site with a clear goal in mind can be designed to take advantage of that goal. As a result, fewer visitors result in more sales.

If your goal was not clear when you had your site created, it may take more visitors to a site in order for sales to happen.

Once you have determined what you want your site to achieve, all you need to do is make your goals measurable and realistic. For example, if you get 5000 visitors per month and aim at converting 2% of these visitors into clients, then your Website goal can be as little as 100 new targeted prospects per month to double your sales.

The difference is that those 100 visitors will visit a more targeted site, and convert to sales at double the rate.

Remember that the next time you hire a web site designer.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Design Secret Number Two:
Raw Traffic Numbers are Misleading. Base Your Traffic Goals on Sales

One million visitors to your site every month would be grand if all one million of those people were to take your most desired action. However, on the Internet, this is almost never the case. In fact, there isn’t a single documented case of a site getting one million visitors in the space of a month and having all one million of those visitors make a purchase on their first visitors.

Now you know something your competitor doesn’t – the number of people who come to your site, in and of itself, is not the meaningful number. Here’s another thing that should be wide knowledge and isn’t – the number that matters, in terms of traffic, is the conversion rate.

What’s a conversion rate? That’s the number of people who visit your site, divided by the number of people who take action, or convert from visitor to member, subscriber, or buyer, depending on the situation. The average rate of conversion online is 1%, but there are ways to get that number higher.

Now, let’s see if you’re getting this concept. Think about the following question – is it better to have 5000 visitors a day to your ecommerce site who just browse your site, or 50 visitors a day who subscribe that day, and make a purchase later on that month, given the average rate of conversion online?

It’s a trick question. 1% of 5000 visitors is still 50 people.

But what if your conversion to subscribers was 30% and 90% of them resulted in a sale that month? You’d be able to make a lot more revenue, with a lot less traffic.

When you design your site, your goal should be to transform a few targeted visitors into sales, not to hope for a few sales from a sheer volume of visitors. Proper web design can help you reach that goal. We’ll talk more about this in the next installment.

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Today is the first day of the Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below – look at the bottom of each post for the link to each post.

Our discussion of the low cost design secrets starts today with Incorporating Goals into your Web Site Design..

The first thing you want to look at before you design are the goals of your website. What’s your reason for having a site in the first place? If it’s because everyone else has one, or because you’ve been told that serious business should, then you might take a look at what you hope would happen with your website, and backtrack realistically to your goal.

For example, you might decide that you’re hoping that a lot of people will come to your site and find out about your brick-and-mortar business or that your consulting firm will get more inquiries.

But what you ultimately want for your business through your website is more sales, or leads, or more actions that lead to sales or leads. Whether that means branding, a place for visitors to sign up to your newsletter, or the possibility of an impulse sale, if you want your web site to generate interest in your products or services, you must start with your goal in mind.

If you don’t have a goal for your web site it will go nowhere. If you don’t know what your goal is before you get a web site designer, your web site will be ineffective all-around, and you may end up redesigning the entire site, and spending needless amounts of money.

We’ll talk more about how design factors into your web site goals next time.

Nina
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Read the Rest of the Low Cost Web Site Design Secrets Series

I’ve decided to start a blog about web site design secrets, in order to have a place to expand on more of the frequently asked questions about designing a site. These include:

• How much should it cost?
• What To Do Before Design?
• Usability Issues
• The Consistency Factor
• Colour
• Faster Loading Pages
• Copywriting
• Element Placement

and about 22 other things to think about before, during and after the process of hiring a designer to develop your pages.

To start with, we’ll be doing a 30 day series on Low Cost Web Site Design Secrets. Please feel free to comment, and I hope you enjoy it. You can follow the series here.

Nina
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