Part 4

Your homepage is the first thing that your website visitor sees, so when you are planning your website design and website development it really needs to be an eye catcher. But contrary to popular belief, your goal for your homepage is not to give to much information or to really away too much.

What you should be aiming for is when your visitors click onto your site you want them to click forward and not back. This means you want to convince them that you have something on your website worth spending more time on to investigate further.

If you have ever been in sales/retail out there in reality you would know that the first thing you want your customer to say is ‘yes’. Well ‘clicking’ is the web version of saying “yes” in the internet sales world. So this is why you want your customer to click forward. Fortunately, you don’t need to impart too much information for them to do that. They want to know only two things and they are: What’s in it for me? and Where do I click?

If you can reveal the information for your visitors to answer those two questions quickly, then you stand a pretty good chance of selling your product to them. On the other hand if you give too much information chances are they won’t bother to read it all and click away.

The way to successful web design and web development is all in the text content. If you haven’t got the copy writing skills to entice your visitors to stay on your site then maybe you should consider using CWD, who are the professionals.

Part 3

Research has shown that most of the time the public do not read all of the information on a site, they scan it.

If your web design and web development does not include clear headers chances are they may click away. Visitors surfing the web will read the headers and maybe the first few lines of paragraphs but only if they see something that catches their interest, then they will read deeper. So they need to scan the header and the first few lines to get the gist. Do not expect every line of your text to be read, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to be word perfect. The secret is to write every line as if it will be read.

You have to build your web design and web development with your user in mind. If you can do this then you can expect to have a successful business. The website should feel smooth to him and natural so he can navigate through the site almost as if it were second nature.

Have you made the order process simple, straightforward and fast in your web design and web development? I have expressed the need for this process to only take a few minutes once the customer has decided to buy. Bear in mind that you don’t need to ask him for any information that you do not directly need to complete his order. Keep the order process short, sweet and super simple.

Part 2

A visitor to your site should know what you’re selling and what the benefits are within the first few lines of your text content. In professional web design and web development this is how it should read, so get straight to the point.

Now that the visitor knows what you are selling any questions that he/she has should be only a few clicks away. If your navigation in your web design and web development is easy and straight forward your visitor will then become a potential customer.

Are the prices displayed? Are they displayed clearly? Never, never expect your customer to have to call a displayed telephone for prices. Odds are they won’t.

When creating and building your website design and website development have you paid enough attention to detail? Check your details and check each link. Run the spell check and check your website on different screen resolutions. Check that your website can run in different browsers. Make sure the text font, color and size is consistent on all web pages throughout the whole website design . There are so many little things to check like text wrapping around graphics in a less-than-conventional manner, and maybe there is too much space at the bottom of a page. Maybe your text is running further down the page than your navigation bar. All these simple mistakes can make the difference between a clean, professional looking website design and an unprofessional looking one. If you are not particular or even a perfectionist about your website design and website development, then people will assume that you won’t be in your business either.

Part one

If you decide that you can effectively create your own website design and website development then there are various tips and advice that I can give you.
Say you’ve completed your website, don’t look at it too closely straight away. Leave it for a several days so that your head is clear of all the planning and brain work that it has taken to create and build your web design and web development. Then with a clear mind click on and imagine you are a potential customer then ask yourself these questions.

Does the content of your text sound just like unconvincing sales talk? The general public hates to feel like they are being sold. Anyway, they have clicked on to your site because maybe they really do want to buy your products. What they don’t want is to purchase anything from a company that sounds unprofessional; as this will only serve to put doubts into your potential customers mind. Your products may be of top quality and your website should make them feel that they can trust you. You will only achieve this by concise, honest, and unbiased information. By this I mean there is never any reason for a double exclamation mark!! AND RARELY IS THERE A RIGHT TIME FOR ALL CAPITALS. This is what is called ‘dressing it up with overused sales jargon’ and it can appear amateurish and cheesy, not the sort of impression you want to portray. Obviously you are enthusiastic about your products, and so you should be but retain your dignity and it will show in your content.

Some times you cannot do it all yourself and therefore maybe you should consider employing a professional copy writer to enhance your web design and web development.

Part 2

There’s also the aspect of professionalism when creating your web design and web development. An invalid HTML is like making spelling mistakes and although not all of the visitors to your site will see the mistakes in your code, there will be some that will. A successful web design will not be one full of typos and/or spelling errors, so you should never settle for a HTML page that contains even minor validation issues.

One of the more common validation errors is that when you visit a site or create a web design and web development, it can look great, but on some occasions the quality of code will not match the quality of the web design. Errors like this can easily be fixed in just a few minutes so it’s well worth correcting it. One of the worst things you could do validation wise is to forget a doctype. If you omit the doctype it will mean the browsers will have to guess what language your page is written in. The solution to fix this error and all the subsequent issues is to add an HTML or XHTML doctype to your page.

Forgetting to close an element is another error. If you’ve opened a tag somewhere in your HTML document, you must remember to close it in the appropriate place. This is an important element as forgetting to do so won’t just invalidate your HTML, it may also cause some serious problems in you’re your layout.

Most HTML elements have a separate closing tag, e.g. </div>, but there are other elements that are self closing, and these will have a trailing slash before their closing bracket. If a web designer forgets this, it is the same as forgetting to close a tag altogether.

The ampersand is more than likely the most popular character offender here, as well as quotation marks if they have been copied in from Word. Checking your body copy and convert any signs and special characters to the appropriate symbol.