Site Design and Usability Landmines

Designing the perfect website is not just about knowing what the look and feel of your site should be; it’s more about giving your visitors the perfect experience in every possible way. Looks do matter, but what’s the use if the visitor doesn’t feel like your site is helping? Much about your site design education is simply knowing what mistakes you do not want to make.

One of the first things people want to know when they land on a site is what is the purpose of it. It seems readily apparent based on all the sites we have seen that IM marketers perhaps do not consider that at all. Just look at how you behave on a site, if you do not like it for any reason – you are out of there. As you know, online readers do not generally spend a lot of time reading because they skim text; so that means your text has to be formatted to support that. Big black blocks of text will intimidate people and does not facilitate skimming and scanning at all. Think about using more white space because that just makes it look easier to read (scan) and people will do it. Plain old easy to read font is what your copy needs to be written with on your site. Your visitors will not have a good experience on your site if they have a hard time reading and understanding it. We want to say a fast word about our discussion re Web Design Atlanta. How can you possibly cloak the links that appear on your website, and why would anyone do it? You will find that affiliate marketers will most often cloak links, and there are other legitimate concerns. You will not want to practice cloaking for some reasons, but primarily it is to hide your links. Practices like commission theft have always been present, and there is no totally iron clad way to protect your links. Then there are other important concerns such as using good anchor text and so forth. How you color code your site links is naturally up to you, as well. We will not tell you what to do in this area of link cloaking because it is your call.

If you were not present at the birth of the web, then we will just tell you that it was all HTML and little else. Perhaps you have started using CSS to make all your tables instead of HTML? There are lots of good reasons to use CSS rather than strict HTML, but that is up to you of course.

There’s not one but many reasons why CSS gives you way better results since it’s a lot more faster and reliable. Not to forget, CSS is much more customizable and has features that you wouldn’t find when using HTML.

You can turn around a site that is performing poorly, but you will need to have patience and implement all you learn about site design, etc.

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