Melbourne IT

If you believe great website design begins and ends with animation and flashy graphics, you’re fooling yourself.

Yes, there are places for animation, and occasional places for flashier graphics. But as long as you want to build traffic, satisfy your website visitors and make your business an online presence, you should think twice before getting fancy with your design.

Website Design Basics

A long time ago, when the internet was new, websites were pretty bare bones basic. If they had graphics, those graphics often looked cheap, and they definitely slowed down the page loading time on our old, sluggish computers.

But as the internet matured, so did our graphic capabilities. Unfortunately, those fancier graphics also lured many to miss the point of a website: great information.

Basic web design should be neat, clean and fast-loading. Yes, some people still have dial-up internet, and your animation is going to bog them down for an hour. They’ll leave in frustration.

An uncluttered design that’s easy to use will bring visitors back over and over; as long as you have valuable content to bring them back.

Your navigation should be simple and straightforward – and available on all pages of your website to prevent visitors from having to click backwards to see previous pages or find any usable navigation.

Simple website design is by far the most user-friendly, and it doesn’t have to look cheap or cheesy. Two columns work great on many a popular website. If you really feel you need three columns, remember to keep them orderly.

Use plenty of white space to rest the eyes. Reading on a computer screen strains the eyes more than reading on paper, so think about your readers and keep the lines short and well-spaced.

And one warning about background colors and text color: reverse print (light-colored text on a dark background) is a bad idea for your main content, no matter how cool you think it looks. It’s exhausting to read for more than a few minutes, and illegible to many older eyes entirely. Use light backgrounds and black or dark text for most of your content.

Cheap Web Design

You may be tempted by an “inexpensive” web design bid. Don’t be. Cheap web design is just that: cheap. It won’t, in the long run, help your business grow online, help build traffic to your website, or help your visitors. Which should be your ultimate goal.

Cheap design tends to use free or cheap website layout programs. You get locked into templates you can’t really revise to fit your company’s look. You may not read the fine print in their terms, either, and find that your “cheap” website hosting suddenly isn’t so cheap, or ends with no notice!

If you try to add on other needs, like automatic newsletter send-out or traffic monitoring, you’ll end up spending a bundle. It’s not very cheap to try to scrabble together everything a cheap program doesn’t supply.

Better to stick to a website designer who will not only create a suitable design, but will help create traffic and maintain the site with updates and changes as needed. Those can be hard to find. Too many designers do your design, then leave it in your hands, assuming it’s “done” forever with five or ten pages.

Do some research, and you should be able to find a webmaster who can do the design, handle the maintenance and help you build your traffic base, too.

Next time you’re tempted to go the inexpensive route, add up the costs of everything not included. Effective website design does not have to cost a mint. But it should include easy navigation, clean layouts and an uncluttered look overall. Sure, it can still look professional, but make sure it does the job it should: to support and enhance the content of your website.