Aplus.net Blog

The elements of a great website are basic and common sense when you think of your website the same way as you would your brick and mortar store. You need to make a good impression and inspire confidence in your customers with visually appealing and easy to use navigation. On the Internet, you don’t have a sales person to help your customer through your online store, so you need to give your customers the tools they need to navigate your website.

Usability studies help in the process of designing your website for your customers. When working on the usability on your website you should think about the eye path and how people process what they are buying. For your website to be a good design, your customer’ thought process should be taken into consideration. Some Items such as search boxes, login areas, logos, and navigation are in the same place on every website. To learn a little more about usability check out “Web Development, Usability, and SEO: Just another Temi’s Blog”.

To help you visualize these ideas, take the following into consideration. If you are a flower shop, you should be showing your best bouquets on your homepage because it is the entrance to your store (website). Unfortunately, every page could potentially be an entrance for a customer, so make sure that you invest extra time in determining what type of people will be coming to your website on different pages. For example, if you have a discount bouquet page the customers coming to the page want high value for low dollar, so the images should show your “largest” discount bouquet, the specials should lean towards discounts, and the call to action (CTA) should be pushing a value point-of-view. This is important in the conversion rate for your customers and how loyal your customers are.

Innovation is important in business, but not on your website. Research what other websites in your industry look like (preferably companies that are the same size as you are). Please share your thoughts on what makes good web design below.  Feel free to include some example websites in your comments.