How To Make A Winning Website
We’ve all visited websites that just seem to draw us in and want to stay. We have all seen others that make us want to leave, even before we’ve given them the opportunity to tell us what they have to offer. What is the difference between the two?
Cookbooks may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they make a good example of how to design a good website versus a bad one. Let’s take a look at a couple of sites and see what makes one stand out from the other.
There is a cookbook for everything. There are cookbooks for ethnic foods, cookbooks for dieters, cookbooks for meat lovers and cookbooks for vegetarians. There must be thousands of topics to choose from. When someone goes to a website for the first time, they are not going to stay for a long time.
An experienced web designer is well-aware of this. He is not going to waste words on the homepage. He’s going to have professional copy that entices the reader to stay, but the emphasis is going to be on making it easy for the visitor to find what they’re looking for. His catalog of books will be the focus of the home page.
Everything will be catalogued in such a way that the viewer knows within seconds exactly where to go to find the book they’re looking for. If they want cake decorating books, they will see a tab or link that makes them feel confident they will find it quickly if they click on that link. If they want to find a new Mexican recipe, the homepage should make it possible for them to find a link to that general category within seconds.
The website that you run from will make you scroll down the page while they explain in detail why their website is so wonderful. When you want to know how to decorate cake, you don’t want to have to scroll down a sidebar that lists each title in alphabetical order and hope to find one that sounds like it might be about what you’re looking for. On the homepage, this is a very bad idea. Keep it short and categorize your offerings.
Almost every website with a number of products has a search facility. However, this should not be thought of as a replacement for a well designed homepage. The visitor hasn’t come to a search engine – a search engine has already directed them to the site. If they typed ‘cake decorating designs‘ once in google, they don’t want to do it again on your site. Also, while you want to make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, you also want them to notice other books while you’ve got their attention.
Use a pleasing design that fits your theme. Make your homepage short and sweet. Those are the two basic rules to designing a website that works.