Best Practices for Website Design
Successful DotNetNuke web design is not just a matter of ascetics it requires the appropriate presentation modules, design principles, seo content, complimentary links and action request triggers.
The best practice for good website design is to offer your viewer and search engines a logical information flow while making your content interesting and easy to understand. Define clear starting points and then guide them through your topic content flow step by step without confusing anyone or the search engine bots.
Basic Best Practice Website Design Guides include:
Marvin’s Rule 1: Keep your web design Speedy, Simple and Sleek!
NO Animation, Flashing Objects or distracting gizmos.. Flashing objects scrolling images and other attention grabbers will do just that and take the visitors attention away from your content. If your product is better demonstrated with animation or some other multi-media gizmo, provide a clickable action request and allow your viewer to select the option.
White Space. Just because you have a whole screen that doesn’t mean you have to slow it down by filling every pixel with something or other. Your web page should follow a clean outline and provide a consistent style through out the website. Leave a clear space between your DotNetNuke page header and your content modules plus leave adequate space between each section of your module content. Don't cram a lot of pictures and ads. If you have an ad, keep it off to the side or subtly intersperse it between your text. The idea is make your main message easy for your website viewer to understand, follow and act on,
Website Navigation and Content Guides. When creating your site navigation tool keep it simple to learn and easy to use by providing the same navigation style and placement on every page. What you do on your home page should be done the same way through out your website's pages. JoAnne’s Harmony SEO Web design tutorial provides you with the information and examples to build consistent navigation, content guides, and the right colors to build sleek professional website navigation methods. You will learn how to make your website easy to use, your web pages search engine friendly and increase your SERP
You not Me Content. Unless this is your personal family website make it obviously clear to your visitors that you are there for their business. Highlight your product or service. Tell then the benefits they will get. Show how your product/service will make their business better and more profitable. Focus on their need and their desires not yours.
Always keep your links in blue and title your links appropriately. Be clear with your labeling. Marvin’s SEO Marketing 101 for DotNetNuke teaches you all about basic internal and external links
Marvin's SEO Marketing 201 tutorial provides advanced link strategy and methods
Every page of your website must contain a contact and a privacy link. If someone can come to your website and instantly find out who you are, like your product, know how to contact you, and believe that you will protect their personal information they will they be much more confident in doing business with your website. Always include your business address, telephone number and email address as well. This lets viewers know that you are serious about your business and that you welcome their contact.
Speed Test your pages. If viewers have to wait for a page to load they will go away. My test show that if a page doesn't load in 6 seconds you will forfeit 25% of your potential customers, 8 sec = 33% Note we are talking about your primary landing web landing page here.
There are not many hard and fast rules for designing your website in fact knowing the principals and concepts of typography and page design give you the basis to break them.
The important thing to know is that what works well for one situation seldom applies to others. A successful website publication is the result of design choices that are appropriate and relevant to your product/service purpose. The size of your type, choice of DotNetNuke presentation modules, and design elements should be determined by their importance and overall relationship to the page and site. Disproportion creates imbalance which distracts and confuses visitors reducing the page effectiveness.
From Company logo, printed material, website, and promotional advertising to product packaging a common style is required to build customer recognition, trust and confidence in your company and product/service.
So far we have used our marketing research skills to develop our key word list, and our keyword campaign strategy, now we are applying Cognitive Science and Art to learn the best methods to enhance and promote our objectives, the next step will be to use our linguistic and organizational skills to assemble our portal.