How To Make A Winning Website
We've all visited websites that just seem to draw us in and want to stay. We have all seen others that make us want to leave, even before we've given them the opportunity to tell us what they have to offer. What is the difference between the two?
Let's take the example of two websites that sell cookbooks and see how one might go about selling them the right way and the other the wrong way. Once you break it down into its separate components, it's easy to see what makes one website work and another one fail.
There is a cookbook for everything. There are cookbooks for ethnic foods, cookbooks for dieters, cookbooks for meat lovers and cookbooks for vegetarians. There must be thousands of topics to choose from. When someone goes to a website for the first time, they are not going to stay for a long time.
If a web designer has done his job right, he knows this. The message on the homepage will be that you can find what you want fast on this site. He's going to have short, concise content and draw the visitor's attention to the easily navigable index.
Everything will be catalogued in such a way that the viewer knows within seconds exactly where to go to find the book they're looking for. If they want cake decorating books, they will see a tab or link that makes them feel confident they will find it quickly if they click on that link. If they want to find a new Mexican recipe, the homepage should make it possible for them to find a link to that general category within seconds.
You are not going to stay for long at a website that offers too much, too soon on the homepage. People aren't going to spend five minutes reading a long story about why yours is the best cookbook site on the web. They're not going to scroll through a long list of book titles to find one on how to decorate cake. They want to see at a glance where they want to go and click to the next page. Keep it short and sweet on the homepage.
It's always a good idea to offer a search bar if you've got a lot of products to offer. However, don't rely on it. It's there for the people who know what they're looking for, but remember, they probably found your site after doing a search on a big search engine. They should feel like they've already found what they're looking for. Another reason not to make the search bar too prominent is because a person looking for cake decorating designs may be led to just one book. You want to offer them a variety of unexpected choices.
Use a pleasing design that fits your theme. Make your homepage short and sweet. Those are the two basic rules to designing a website that works.
