What You Need To Know About Designing Your Own Website

Just about everyone, at some time during their quest to become the next big Internet millionaire, has designed (or redesigned) their own website. Some have had great success, while others suffered horrible failure. If you happen to be wondering, failure is much more common.

This is because a true web designer often has a formal education and has spent years refining their skills to learn what works and what doesn’t. You see, there is much more to designing a website than appearance alone. You have to think about factors like usability, conversions and SEO, to name just a few.

While professionals like Wildfire Marketing Group can certainly design a powerful and effective website for you, your goal is to design your own, either because you’re on a budget, or you’re an aspiring web designer. In either case, be ready for lots of learning and hard work. A proper web design checklist can help to make sure you cover all your bases-as long as you follow it!

Here are a few of the basics. The more in-depth details will require some more research and tools.

1. Appearance

Looks really do matter. Almost all of your potential clients will visit your website before choosing to do business with you, and the impression you make on them will be formed in just a few seconds. If you can’t impress them quickly, you’ll probably lose them forever. If you’re not a “natural” artist, don’t waste a lot of time on this. Your goal is to make money with your website, so instead, invest in a quality template and modify it for your needs.

2. Speed

People are impatient, so when they visit your website, they want it to download quickly. Don’t fill it up with tons of over-sized graphics, scripts and poorly written code. And no matter what, skip the music and annoying intro videos. No one cares about them, and most people will either hit the mute button, or even worse, the back button. The faster your pages load, the better.

3. Usability

Flash can be great for some things, but never design your entire site, or your navigation with it. If a visitor doesn’t happen to have it installed (anyone on a smart phone, for example) they are unable to access your website. Plus, the search engines really can’t crawl or index your content within a flash site anyway. The bottom line is to make sure your site doesn’t rely on anything that your visitors may not have installed.

4. Call to action

Not having a call to action is like spending the entire night taking to a beautiful woman, but not asking for her phone number. You’ve put a lot of work into getting your website up and running, and even more work into driving traffic to it. Do you really want to just hope that your visitors are so excited that they take the time to figure out what you want them to do, and then do it? Make it clear and simple – if you want them to buy something, your headlines and buttons should clearly indicate that. The same goes for signing up for your newsletter or RSS feed or whatever action you want them to take.

When you’re looking for web design that produces results, Wildfire Marketing Group can help you achieve the success you deserve.