Design Your Own Website That Is User Friendly For Your Visitors

Designing a website on your own can be hard if you are new to website design, but nevertheless I was a beginner before so I know the hardship and pain in creating a website. But how can we (as a beginner) build a website that is user friendly and yet professional looking? By studying those that have great website layout and use it on your own.

Of course you will not be getting a real paid professional looking website when you are a beginner, the good news is that you can change the look of your website later.

Let us look at the picture on top, I am using Amazon as an example. A brief intro about Amazon, is that they started off as a online bookstore, then to selling everything under the sun. As you can see that the hot selling stuffs are in the front or home page of Amazon, as that is what most people online are looking for. That is why if you are following Amazon model, your website needs to be constantly updated, almost automatically.

But what we can learn from amazon is that:

1) It makes use of the whole page to display their stuffs. As most of the websites uses about 70% ~ 80% of the area, so that it helps to focus the visitors and help them to read better as well. Whereas Amazon has tons of things to sell online, so they have to maximized the area they have, and they have long pages as well too. This will depend on the type of market you are marketing online, if your product or services are not as informative, then its best to use the 70% ~ 80% web page in the center.

2) Place most important text on the top left. As we are used to write from the left to the right, so our reading habits also does the same. Amazon is smart to realized that we will look on the left of the page first, then to the right, and slowly strolling down the web page. So make sure to have your most important product or services or announcement on the right of the page. Amazon positions the other departments as text on the left as a navigation for those who want to search on their own.

3) A huge search box at the center top of the web page. This also helps eases the visitors to search for items, as there are millions of things in Amazon, so it will make perfect sense to place a search box on every page of the website. If you only have less than 15 pages in your website, you do not need to set up a search box in your website. Only if you have more than 20 pages then it good to have one.

4) Always place a buy button on the top right of the page. Make the button visual to the visitors, a different color for the buy button can help the visitors to see. Of course if you are not doing what Amazon is doing, then next best thing is to have a opt in box on the top right position to collect leads. If you have invested time and money for the visitors to come in, you must do your best to get the visitor’s details, like name and email, or even contact number. So you can send them emails for follow up or inform them of the latest promotion the company is having currently. Read how to create a squeeze page that sells for more information.

5) Linking from home to other web pages. As I noticed that the home page of Amazon has the most links to it’s other web page, and this is also for true for other successful websites. As the time goes by when your website have reputation, visitors will tend to go to your home page first. This is very normal, as the home page is the beginning of a great shopping spreed for the visitors, don’t you do that also? Linking to other web pages that the visitors want to find is very important for the visitors and in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) too. It makes sense that Amazon has hundreds of links to other of its web page.

One important note to take is that the links must be relevant or related to the hyper text or pictures its showing, as this will disrupt the visitor’s experience if they are not relevant, and search engines like Google will not rank you well as you did not bring good experience to the Internet users on your website.

What is your views on the study on designing your website? Share with us your input on the comment, or you can share this article to others.

Popularity: 12% [?]