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Website Marketing tips of the day!
One of the primary implications of a well-organized / good
website, is to keep your visitors in the website. A website is
definitely created for a purpose, unless intended for personal
use, which is the minority. For example, a portfolio website
would want to be visited and it’s content viewed. For
companies and internet businesses, your website certainly aims
to provide product information, to make sales, or somewhat
similar. However, most individuals undoubtly prefer visually
captivating designs, so on and so forth. It is undeniable that
this causes no harm, but one must put himself/herself in other
people’s shoes, as to understand how a visitor to the website
might think, do and react.

1 ) Navigation

As I said, a web designer has to learn how to think the way
your visitors think.

Situation A : Website with good navigation ( 2-3 hyperlinks to
target page ), well planned in terms of placement, and design.

Situation B : Website with poor navigation ( takes forever for
the visitor to reach his/her target page ), hard-to-read
navigation fonts and poor placement of the navigation
buttons/bar.

In Situation A, a visitor will always want to be able to
access his/her target page. For example, the individual comes
across your website, and is interested in the product sold,
but wants to find more information. He/she finds the
navigation with no trouble, and enters the particular product
information page.

As for Situation B, a visitor stumbles into the website, and
would also like to find out more information about the
product. Unfortunately, due to bad placement and fanciful font-
types, the visitor takes forever, or even fails to find the
navigation bar. Even when he/she does so, links to the product
information are nowhere to be found, (example : home > about >
products > product image > etc…[a few more clicks] > product
information ).

Analysis : In both situations, wouldn’t a website with
characteristics similar to the Situation A be more rewarding
ergo better?

When Is the Right Time to Redesign?

If you run a website, chances are you often wonder whether it
is the right time to do a total redesign of the layout of your
website. Here are some points to consider:

Are you thinking of a redesign just for the sake of it? If you
answered yes to that question, it is not yet the right time to
do a redesign. Remember, a design serves a specific purpose.
If you are not sure whether to do an overhaul of your site,
keep in mind that your current design might have a specific
purpose that you might not know about. You will lose that
function if you do a redesign.

On the other hand, if your website has had the same website
design since 1990, perhaps it is high time to do a redesign.
The last thing you would ever want to happen to your site is
when visitors leave your site without taking a look at your
content just because the design is old fashioned. If this is
your case, here are some points to ponder before doing a
redesign.

Redesigning your website is like performing plastic surgery on
it. Your website loses its current identity (for the better or
worse) and your regular visitors might not recognise your new
design at first glance. You risk losing them just because they
thought they landed on the wrong page. Hence, it is very
important that you retain a characteristic feature from your
old layout. Perhaps it is the logo of your site; perhaps it is
the same text style for the title for your site.

To play it safe, put a poll on your site to let your visitors
do the talking. If they think it is necessary for the website
to have a fresh look, give it to them!