FIRST IMPRESSION IS OFTEN THE LAST IMPRESSION In a world dominated by Google and Face-book, having online presence is important for your business. A website will allow you to have more visitors than you ever had. But for that, it is necessary that you have an alluring website. A website is alluring when it conveys what it is meant to be and that too in the simplest manner. It is not collage of pictures and text, just in between. Designing is a very important aspect of your website. It gives the first impression of your business. Your designing should be perfect; you obviously don’t want the first impression to go wrong. For a flawless design, you will have to take care of several things. Here is a list of things that will demand your attention Sense of balance One look at your website and the visitor should be able to understand your business. You shouldn’t just use images or texts. It should have a good combination of both. An uncluttered and structured web page will have a good impact. *One way of uncluttered your website is to use hyper-links for words and ideas that need more explanations. By doing this you can make the page less congested and still discuss things in detail. Contrast Using contrasting colors will allow your text to be visible. It is not mandatory that you only choose black and white colors. Choose colors that add personality to your business and do keep in mind that it should complement the colors used in your logo. Color Colors have a great meaning in every culture. You will have to choose colors according to your target market. If you are dealing in bridal dress in the States, then you should choose colors which will complement white. This is so because white is used for bridal dresses. But if you are doing the same business in India, white cannot be chosen as it is considered inauspicious for weddings. Avoid the temptation of using many colors. Stick to two or at the most three colors in your website. Emphasis You have built your website with the objective of getting more business. So it is necessary that your website should do its business efficiently. 1> If you have an e-commerce store, then it is necessary that you emphasize the BUY button and not just provide information about your inventory. 2>If you have websites that encourages charity, the DONATE option should be easily visible. Uniformity When you design your website, you should take care of uniformity. The web pages should have consistent template, layout and colors. If you don’t take care of uniformity, the visitor may feel that your business is as unorganized as your website. Paragraph and Line spacing First of all, there should be as less paragraphs as possible. A maximum of 4-5 lines or 3-4 sentences is enough for a paragraph. Long paragraphs can demotivate your reader. Font You cannot go for Times New Roman font size 12 in your website. You will need to check how several font types and sizes appear in various MOST USED browsers and then decide on one which looks good everywhere and every time. Plagiarism-image and content It may happen that you liked an image and embedded it in your website. Now if you are not a professional, you may not know that it is actually stealing. Same is the case, when you use someone else’s content without permission. Use of image A picture speaks a thousand words. Images are always useful because all your visitors may not be proficient in the language you are communicating. But the problem is that images take more time to load. Users may not want to wait that long and you will lose them. And so you will have to use lesser images. Even then, you must use the image slicing technique to increase the loading time Alternate tags to image The search engine robot doesn’t recognize an image so it is essential that you give alternate tags otherwise the search engine may not give you a ranking. The reason-it is not fully aware of the content put on your website. JavaScript and Plug-ins Required Your website should work even when the user has disabled Java script. If you ask to activate it, users might feel wary of it and leave your site. Browser Compatibility Your targeted market holds great importance in decision making. As of now, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is the most used web-browser. It covers around 41% of the market share all over the world (Survey by Stat Counter in July 2011). But if your target market doesn’t use Internet Explore and uses Firefox, you will have to check your website’s compatibility with it. Also when you are promoting your business, your website should be compatible with almost all the browsers so that there remain only weak chances of losing your customers. WITH SMART PHONES, YOU WILL HAVE TO GET SMARTER ERROR-404 (Broken or Missing links) The Error 404 is displayed when someone asks for a page that’s not available on your site. If you have deleted any pages, then the links to those pages won’t work. Also if you have given wrong paths, the required page won’t open. This will create a bad impression of your website. So, you will have to constantly maintain your site and keep checking for broken/missing links. Site Map While designing your website, you will have to take care of the site map as well. A site map has all your web pages listed. With the help of site map, you can prioritize your pages. It will also help the search engine to prioritize the pages when it wants to show them in results. Your home page may not have links of all the pages, so it is essential that user gets all the pages at one place to get an idea about the business. Site map will help you in this aspect. By hiring a web designer, you will be able to give more time to the strategic aspects of your business. Remember that your customers have lot many options and they will happily shift to others, so it is essential that you have a perfect website. You just can’t take chances with it. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Make that perfect first impression by a flawless web design.