Website Design - Website design and layouts

The first step to any website designing project is of course, obtaining a domain name for a domain name registration company. Now that you have got your domain name registered, the next important step to consider is the design of your website, whether designing it yourself or by a website design company, all depending on your budget and knowledge.

For those who have yet to register the domain, the optimum sequence in which to actually go about this is to actually have a useable website ready to be uploaded once your domain name is ready. In other words, focus on obtaining a website before the registration of the domain name. Why have a domain name live with no content or website to it, or waste days after your registration is complete? So, the smartest thing to do is to have your website, whether small, medium or large, ready and useable before the domain name registration is done. Your "small but useable" website is what this article focuses on..

When referring to "small but useable" it is important to keep these in 3 things in mind : simplicity, appropriate content, simple navigation. If one of these key elements are missing to your site, you are more then likely to trip over yourself and run into some problems with your site, as far as the success of it goes. Strike a perfect balance between them and you are bound to succeed.

Simplicity: Website have no need for complexity or elements of grandeur for them to be effective and serve their purpose. Keep everything about your website as simple as you can. Look at the flow of your content, your language - do you use any unnecessary nomenclature? Not everybody visiting your site are Internet savvy, and most can be considered Internet "illiterate". Therefore it is important not to scare them with advanced terminology, no matter what theme your website is about. The layout of the site (website design) is another important thing to look at. Too many things on a website can become confusing and can be an important reason why people might leave your site. This is especially important if you are considering the potential of your visitors, who might be your future clients/buyers/affiliates . You will do yourself a great deal of good sticking to simplicity.

Appropriate content: Content is arguably the most important aspect of the website. One must look at this aspect in 2 parts: making sure that the design and content of your site will suffice to grab the visitors attention, and keep them interested, and second, that your site will be search engine friendly, and will be inviting to search engine "spiders" . Visitors will want to the be pleased with what they see - spiders don't care, they want logic and content. For the visual part, it will depend on the website design. For the logic and content, that will be you website's meta tags, keywords titles and other such elements - these are what will come in handy with the spiders. As for visitors, they can be reached across better if you can help them identify and relate to your message or proposal in a more emotional manner. Your visitors will not stay on your site or purchase your product because you ASP or because you have designed your website in java. Your site content (and image) needs to inspire trust and interest. Thus, your website's content it the hearth and sole of it so make sure you keep that as a top priority...

Simple navigation: Insure you site is easy to navigate. Matching pages, clear descriptions of each section and a good internal linking structures are important. Site maps are very important. All these will help your visitors focus and keep their attention on what they came to your site for. As your site gets bigger and further content is added, insure to include them to your site map. This will also help the spiders to reach all your pages. Make sure all your pages are connected, that there are no broken links, etc.