There’s nothing worse than a blinking, flashing, darkly-colored webpage covered in advertisements. Most visitors will leave rather than try to sort out the confusion.

Here are ten tips to keep your web pages clean and attractive, while at the same time garnering higher conversion rates:

1. Keep it “scan able.” In other words, have enough titles in larger print, bolding, highlighting and underlining to entice your readers in further. Most visitors will do a quick scan of the page before settling in to read or moving on. Make sure their eyes stop at places of interest.
2. Make sure your navigational links are consistent, simple and obvious so everyone can move easily from page to page. Your navigation system is not a place where you want to get fancy. Simple text links ordered vertically or horizontally work well. So do buttons and filing cabinet-like tabs.
3. Make sure the appearance matches your content, including any ads. For example, if you have an article about the symptoms to watch for when diagnosing cancer, you don’t want a lot of happy colors, blinking ads and loud music. Tone it down and keep it professional. On the other hand, if your site is about kids’ toys, a little more color and movement and silliness would be expected.
4. If this is your sales page, there should be no other advertising on it at all. Nor should you have the normal navigational links your other pages have. You want the only link away from that page to be your order link. Don’t, however, block the usefulness of the browser back button! This will only anger your visitor.
5. Use a common font, like Times New Roman or Arial. Stick to 12 point. Using a more exotic font may look great on your machine, but if your visitor doesn’t have access to that font, it will look totally different on his screen.
6. If you want to use your signature online, get a scanned-in copy to put on the website instead of using a script font. These fonts aren’t available to everyone’s web browsers.
7. Don’t let your background color or image compete or clash with your foreground. A plain white background is usually sufficient and preferable, as it’s easy on the eyes. A dark background with a contrasting colored text is very tiring to read and should always be avoided.
8. Any time you try a new design, be sure you look at it through different web browsers and screen resolutions. An online service can help you with this. Go to Browser Shots to see how your page looks through different browsers.
9. If the primary content of your page is an article or other useful information, make sure it prints well, or in some cases you may want to link to a printable version – free of ads, color and links.
10. There’s a time and place for everything. The place for large paragraphs with no white space is in the legal sections of your site – the places you hope no one reads, but you must have there by law! Long paragraphs will not grab your readers or encourage them to read more. You want to break them into shorter paragraphs being sure to keep use subtitles and white space in between.

Keep your eye on these tips during design, and look it over when you’re done with a critical eye. There are exceptions to these rules, just like every rule. But violating too many of them will surely scare away readers rather than make them click your order button.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.