TBIDesigns

As a small company, it’s usually wise to hand over the design of your site to an expert. The more your time and energy is best spent to attract and provide service to your customers.

However, the more you know about web design, the more you can guide your web designer to a conclusion that fits your needs.

This is your site, and is the online face of your business. Do not let your web designer to make these mistakes on your site - please.

My Top 5 Web Design Pet Peeves:

5. Page overboard

Your web designer can enjoy showing off his mastery of the latest technology, but that does not mean they belong on the site.

Going overboard by adding animation or a “splash page” not only adds to the page loading time, but it can really irritate visitors who want to see only the information they came for.

Irriterad visitors equal lost revenue and lost opportunities, so keep your site clean, simple and easy to navigate.

4. Not pertinent

Content is king when designing your site, is equally important to both of the major groups that will determine the success of your site.

The first group is your site visitors. It has come in pursuit of specific, timely and relevant information, and they want it now. If they can not find it, so poof, they are gone!

The second group are the search engines. If the search engines to find relevant information on the site, where they’ll pass along your site as a source for this information.

To keep your visitors and search engines happy, a site requires that your ongoing attention. Outdated information, send a message to your visitor that you do not take care of business. They can easily assume that you also will not take care of them as a customer.

Oh, and did not even get me started on the kind of impression you make with poor grammar and spelling errors, enough said.

3. Graphic Buying

Do not let your site be hostage to your pictures. When you introduce non-text elements of your web design, you reduce the availability of your pages, and this creates problems for people with particular needs.

You may have visitors who are visually impaired and dependent on the screen, or who still rely on dial-up access (up to 30% of Internet users).

So to make your own web site called, friendly and accessible, limit the number of graphics, then only the truly complement your page. Then the graphic Web-ready by taking these steps:

a. Compress the file to either JPG (for photos) or GIF (for icons, buttons, etc.) format.

b. Crop any dead space.

c. Save the image with a resolution of 72 dpi, which is the ideal solution for websites.

d. Add appropriate “alt” tags to all images so that screen readers can properly “read” the graphics, menus, buttons and text.

2. Graphic Monstrosities

With great graphics that slow down your site is bad enough. Flashing, scroll, or animated text is even worse. But with the help of fuzzy, distorted, or unprofessional graphics, it is absolutely the worst crime you can commit a website.

This will immediately give the impression that your work is of low quality - Remember that your site is the online face of your business.

Adding to the professional graphics need not be expensive. You can pick up the web-ready images on www.istockphoto.com for a buck!

1. And my number 1 web PET PEEVE is…. Keyword stuffing

There is a very disturbing and unethical web design trend that is occurring right now. Designers will “stuff” a website with keywords so that it is identified in the most popular keyword searches, whether this site has nothing to do with the subject of the search.

The disappointment visitor can spend a few minutes at your side to try and find what they were looking for, but the naive hope that they will then get sidetracked from their search because the site is so interesting is a risky tactic.

More than likely, they will click away in frustration, and you will have lost their trust forever by deceiving them.

Folks, web design is really quite simple. People visit sites that they need something - information, a product or a service.

When they come to your site, they want rapid access to accurate, relevant and current content that is easy to see and not cluttered by advertising.

Your site need not be the most beautiful or have the latest Gizmos and cool tricks to get your point across and serve your visitors.

Stick with the basics, and if your web designer driver you to commit any of these pet peeves, watch out!

Visit http://www.coast2coastbusiness.com/small-business-web-site-design.html to find out if web services from Coast2Coast Business Support Solutions.