5 "Must Have" Elements Your Website Design Needs to Succeed

The purpose of any business website at the end of the day is to be successful. You want to be able to attract and hold the attention of visitors & prospective clients. With that in mind here are a handful of effective website design elements to bear in mind when creating your website.

1. Attractive & Effective Visual Design

This is all about the first impression made by your website. Visual design must have sufficient impact to attract a visitor's attention, yet not overpower the message of the website.

A website design that is clean and simple is very effective. There are so many websites out there that are either cluttered with fancy effects and images, or lack any and all sense of design and look outdated. These are the two ends of the spectrum you do not want to be at.

Your website design needs to be attractive, whilst at the same time promote the content that is on it.

2. Navigation

We have all experienced the frustration of visiting a website we are interested in, but have no idea how to navigate to the information we desire. Navigation must be clear and obvious so as not to lose a visitor due to frustration.

Tips for navigation placement are ensuring that the navigation is as close to the top of the page as possible. The idea here is that the visitor can see it witout having to scroll down the page.

Additionally, it is a good idea to include the same navigation at the bottom of the page so that it is easy to change pages if a visitor has scrolled to the bottom of a long page.

3. Cross Browser Compatibility

Cross Browser Compatability refers to whether or not your website looks the same to all the people all over the world who visit it. It may look different if they are using a different Internet Browser or if their screen resolution is different to yours.

The first step to a compatable website is valid code. This is important for search engine optimization too. Secondly, your website designer or developer must test your website in different browsers to establish a consistant view for the major browsers.

4. Web Optimized Images

While images can add some much needed visual appeal to your website design, you must be careful in what format you include these images. The danger is that your images are unneccessarily large and consequently take forever to load. This can result in visitors growing impatient and leaving your website.

It is important to ensure all images are compressed into either "jpeg" or "gif" files. You will lose some quality in this process but your images can still look fantastic if done correctly. Something else to consider is to make sure your image resolution is set to 72 dots per inch(dpi) as apposed to the popular 300dpi used in print media.

5. Contact Information

Be sure to include sufficient and accurate contact details so potential clients can get a hold of you. This may seem obvious, but too often outdated information is used, or there was a typo and consequently you aren't getting the expected volume of prospective clients calling you.

It is important to include at the very least a contact form for visitors to send you an email. A form is advisable over just posting your email address online, as it is less likely to be exposed to SPAM (unwanted junk mail). You are also able to specify conditions for submitting an email, such as a person's name and their telephone number, or the name of the company they represent.

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