Intense graphics, too much flashy special effects and your logo design all eat into your website’s load time. As business owner first and a webmaster second, you need to ask yourself these questions:

* What do I want my website to accomplish?
* My website in its current state, does it accomplish what I want?
* Can I limit the amount of graphics used and still broadcast my message?
* How I maintain the viewer friendly design of my website?

1) What Do I Want My Website To Accomplish?

When answering this question go beyond the obvious answer of ‘I want to make money.’ More importantly, ‘How can I give the customers what they want while still achieving my business goals?’

Remember these 4 key points: what are my customers’ problems; what solutions have they sought (or ones that didn’t work); what I will offer to provide this solution and finally; why they should buy from me. When you have successfully answered these questions, get an objective opinion. Why? What you may think are reasons may not be what others see (i.e. your customers).

2) My Website In Its Current State, Does It Accomplish What I Want?

If you are creating a new website, you have the advantage of starting with a clean slate and progressing towards your goal. If you are an existing website owner, you may need to re-evaluate if your website is accomplishing what you originally set as its goals.

The ultimate review is this: Am I attracting enough customers to my website and are they buying my service or product? If you are attracting customers, yet they aren’t buying, you need to review your prices and checkout process. If they proceed to checkout and then balk (click away) again you need to determine why. If the reverse is occurring and you have frequent customers and they are buying, it may be time to see if you can add more products they may be interested in – (either through a newsletter or alerting them on the website). This will allow you to ‘up-sell’ to your customer and provide them will more solutions to their problems.

3) Can I Limit The Amount Of Graphics Used And Still Broadcast My Message?

Limiting the amount of graphics used will help your website load faster and will help deliver your message to the customer quicker. However, just because your website may have a lot of graphics doesn’t mean that it has to load fewer graphics; it may mean that the size of the file may have to be reduced in order to have the products listed show properly. For example, if you are showing ladders on your website, you may group them according to height and to no more than 3 per page.

4) How Can I Maintain The Viewer Friendly Design Of My Website?

When mapping your website allow for the fact that you will expand your website to include more information, products or services. Do not build your website with a limited capacity. You will automatically restrict yourself from expanding and possibly create more headaches down the road when you expand.

Some points to remember:

* Have clear titles
* Include a site map
* Include an ‘About Us’, ‘Contact’ and ‘Privacy’ page where people can see a real address and phone number

When you create your website, keep these questions in mind. Get some objective feedback from someone who gives you their true opinion and doesn’t say things to make you feel good. The reason: your customers don’t know you and will at any opportunity click away from your website if given the chance. You minimise the direct chance of clicking away and maximise the opportunity to provide the customer with what they want and you fulfill your business goals

written by : Mark Gerrard

Your website is highly important for your online business and you should observe those rules of thumb and avoid common blunders with an eye toward making them less common if you want it to achieve good results.  Some of the common mistakes are:

1. Overly wordy web designs that make your website loaded with problems including perception, a comprehension, and a design. It will be wise to slice it down by being brief to drive the online visitor to take action.

2. Ugly web designs consists of pixilated graphics that were not sized for the screen, a lack of integrated design, and the use of free clip art instead of artwork designed specifically for your pages.

3. Useless Website- that is your website does not have a point to make, a mission statement of its very own. Your website does not offers excellent content which can be graphics, text or interactive features.

4. Lack of traffic flow planning is a common flaw in web design, especially inexpert design. A good website is equipped for its user with easy navigation tools effective enough to persuade the user to whip out their credit card, send an email, or download something fascinating.

5. Lack of tracking features keeps you aloof of the necessary information of whether or not your website is meeting its mission which is very important for the progress of your website. Therefore the tracking feature is the only way to you will be able to measure the level of progress.

The criteria for good web design depends upon the person and the purpose of each site and these common mistakes all point to a lack of forethought on the part of the would-be web designer.

written by: Brad smith

Greater Manchester boasts over 50 museums and galleries and has the largest concentration of theatres in the UK outside London. It contains the UK’s largest university which has over 30,000 students. The attraction to Manchester for students began in the 80’s when many bands from Manchester were making headlines. Bands such as The Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, The Smiths and Oasis all made their mark on Manchester around this time and this gave Manchester University the highest population of Students in the UK.

If you live in the Manchester area and have a business and are thinking having a website designed for your company then you need think about a few important factors. Do you have a domain name? Do you need hosting? What is your budget? Do you need an ecommerce website with a shopping trolley to sell products? Will you need to update your site yourself in the future? Once you have answered these questions you can then go about finding a good company that offer all of these services.

Finding a competent company that has a portfolio of work is very helpful. You can look through their portfolio and see some of the websites they have designed for previous customers. The eCommerce design is very important to the success of any web site. You want to be sure that your website is designed right. One of the first things you notice about a website is whether it is pleasant to the eye. Bright flashing coloured text is very off putting as is a flash intro. A very important key is to make sure your site loads quickly. You will loose a great deal of customers if your pages take over 5 seconds to load.

It is a lot easier if you can find a company that can do everything for you. A company that can sell you the domain name as well as the hosting. Some hosting companies also offer web design which would make the whole experience a lot easier. Dealing with the same people for your domain name, hosting, email, web design makes the who process a lot easier. For one you only need one contact telephone number. A company with good customer support is a must. Not all companies offer this and this and it can be very frustrating. You want to know that if you have any trouble you can just call for customer support or technical support.

written by:  Carolyn Clayton