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Five principles to create an attractive website |
Today more than one billion users waste thousands of hours on misleading web information everyday. As for your customer, it can bring frustration and dissatisfaction; ultimately you will lose your customer. In order to upgrade online experience, in-depth understand of effective coding method becomes essential. In return, your sales and market will be enlarged, which will make you become a better web designer.
Website structure is essential
Our users are constantly being distracted by disorder web links, so please don’t add any more confusion.
What we ought to do is to well organise the web page content. Directly and straight forwardly guide and assist users to find their wanted information and complete their desired task, so that users can save time for other stuff.
Navigation, information and links should be organised according to target users’ need, but not client company structure.
Case study: A company that operates a merge company has already owned a website containing all sub department WebPages (such as legal department, account department, marketing department, etc.) Users then need to try out among different pages, or even need to attempt their desired information in any department.
Solution: Using user need as a structural guide, reconstructs the website and content, for instance divide into blocks according to user task.
Although the commercial activity itself is very complicated, allowing users to find their needed information should not be a difficult task.
Increase the Readability of your web page
Increase the Readability of your web page
Client website would not force you to find information through a long-winded and vague introductory text.
The study found that majority of our users only scan information, and hence what you need to do is to keep the page clean and simple. Generally speaking, if you want to turn a promotional brochure into a web page, ultimately what is left is half of the original or less.
Elements for a professional website:
1) Content relevant title
2) Subtitle (secondary title)
3) Important points
4) Brief, single topic paragraph
5) Explanatory links
Try your best to simplify client’s web content, break it down into easy-to-understand blocks of information. Delete unnecessary words, and ensure that each sentence and paragraph to be concise.
The use of easy-to-understand language
People are surprised at the stuffs I have written seem to be understood even to primary kids. My clients and students even doubt that would be offensive to my users.
The answer is no. There is a huge difference between concise communication and vague communication. A simple website will bring intuitive message across, and allow readers to easily process the message in order to communicate further.
Majority of the people may not notice even the national newspaper will adapt this standard. For example, Time magazine, one of the highly respected magazines is also highly comprehensible.
So why don’t you use easy-to-understand language to express your content? Is it because of the self-esteem is at play?
Luxury expression may seem to achieve a higher level, or assist you to win the prize in a design competition, but to your business partners or customers, it really can not create much impact.
Uniform Text Style
Many big companies nowadays try to update their content at different times by different people, which easily led to a contradiction in style.
You should therefore check your web page content paragraph by paragraph precisely.
1) Spelling and typos
2) Format
3) Grammar style
4) Text flow
5) Narrative tone
When facing different commercial markets, you can also refer to a number of industrial guidelines for different writing styles.
For example, when you are writing articles for Canadian market, The Global English Style Guide will help you to use “website”, but to American market, The New York Times Manual of Style & Usage will suggest you to use “Web site” instead.
General speaking, the key to a uniform style is to ensure the uniformity of content. It will not only improve your professionalism, but also the reliability and performance.
Avoid false enthusiasm
Sincere enthusiasm is good, but often we see too much false enthusiasm.
In the past decades, sales team held weekly meeting to mobilise their passion in sales, and the team members who were over-inspired by the meeting would do door-to-door sales and persuade their “potential customers” to buy their products.
With such artificial enthusiasm, each sales person became “pushy”, and unwilling to be rejected, so they kept on selling until the angry customer asked them to shut up.
Today, no one will ever tolerate such “pushy” sales, not even a few seconds. For websites, all communications depend on the duration of the potential customers stay on the page before they hit the “back” button.
Words like “We are the best business for XXX” is telling your customers that,” besides these rubbish information, we have nothing to show you.”
In order to make a compelling arguments, reliable statistics and charts will be the best way to present your professionalism and enthusiasm towards your customers. If all you have are chunk of decorative words, better keep them in your junk mail.
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