Building a Professional Website

Your Website Is Your Salesman

When you go shopping at a "brick and mortar" store, the store's staff will greet you, and knowledgeable salespeople can show you around and explain the features of the products you are looking for. But if you are operating an online store, you don't have the opportunity to talk one on one with potential customers. Therefore, a professionally designed website is crucial to selling your products. However, it doesn't necessarily require a professional webmaster to build a professional-looking website. Having a little knowledge about basic website design should be all you need.

Look Professional

Your home page is most likely the first page visitors will encounter. It must look professional. By that, we mean that the overall layout should be clean, pleasing to the eye, easy to navigate and friendly (not technical). All text should be thoroughly checked for spelling, punctuation and correct grammar. Nothing gives the impression of an amateur site quicker than misspelled words and poor sentence structure. While the actual page design is somewhat subjective, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there are still some fundamental layout concepts that should be considered. To avoid a drab-looking site, use color, but use it wisely. Just because you have 200 colors available doesn't mean you should use them all and look like a circus (unless, of course, your theme supports such an atmosphere). Use colors within the same family. For example, autumn colors like shades of yellow, orange and red complement each other nicely. Include graphics and photographs to draw attention. If your page has a lot of text, consider breaking up lines into sections, perhaps bordered with colored lines. Do not run lots of long text lines all the way across the screen horizontally, as many people have wide monitors, and that makes reading more difficult. Don't be afraid to leave a little blank space on a page to separate items and prevent the eye from becoming fatigued.

A Professional Site Must Work Well

A professional website must not only be professional in the way it looks, but also in the way it works. Visitors to a site are usually looking for specific information or a particular product. Navigation must be set up to enable visitors to easily and quickly home in on what they want. Tabs or radio buttons should be clearly marked to direct visitors to the area in your site where they will find exactly what they are looking for. They should be able to get to the information or product in just a few clicks. Include a site map, which shows a flow of all the pages on the site. Including a site map is also valuable in establishing credibility with the major search engines, which use site maps to ensure that every page in a site is indexed and stored in their massive databases. This will increase the odds of your site coming up favorably on search engine results pages. A site that's easy to use is more apt to keep visitors longer and read your content. Finally, consider how your site will look on different people's monitors. Computer users can set their screen resolutions to a number of settings. "Low end" resolution settings are 800 by 600 pixels. Set your screen resolution to various settings and look at your website. If something looks odd or out of place, you may be able to resize or position page elements so that they look best on the majority of resolution settings.

Detailed Product Descriptions

As we stated at the top of this article, your website is your salesman. Therefore, if you are selling products, it is imperative that detailed information on every product be given. Descriptions, features, specifications and possibly even information from the product's owners manual should be readily available to the site visitor. At least one professional-quality photograph is needed as a bare minimum. Depending on the item, some products will need several photographs taken from different angles. A piece of electronic equipment, for example, may need a picture of the front as well as the back, where connections of cables are shown. Keep in mind that the potential customer cannot touch, hold or physically inspect the item. With photographs and detailed descriptions, your site must entice the potential customer into making a purchase, and give him all the information he needs to buy it.

Resources

• SmartWebby
• eFUSE