Your Website is a marketing tool

In today’s internet driven economy, your website plays an important role in marketing your company, products and its services. It does not matter whether your organization is dealing with something related to the internet or not, a website is a must since most people go to the internet to check out companies before they decide to do business with it.

It is important to ensure that your website visitors get a good impression of your company when they visit your website.

The KISS Principle

You may have already read about this, but the unfortunate reality is that most people ignore this when it comes to websites. Keep It Simple and Stupid is a sure shot way to cater to all classes of website visitors. Simplicity does not mean that your website should look ordinary. On the contrary, keeping the design and appearance simple actually appeals to a lot of people.

Learn how to KISS

Keeping it simple requires a fair amount of planning. The objective here is to ensure that all the essentials are in place and the non essentials out of the way. The following 3 items are most important when it comes to simplicity.

What does your home page say?

Home page content is the first of these. The page should state clearly the purpose and objective of your company as well as the website. It should clearly indicate how someone might be able to get in touch with you on the phone or directly if that is applicable.

Home page is not the place to talk about a lot of details about your product or its specification or any such other detail. It’s a landing page which gives them enough information about what your company does and how they can get more information from the website or directly.

How does your home page appear?

The second aspect is the appearance of the home page itself. The colours and the fonts play a great role here. It should be such that it reflects your company personality. If you have specific company colours then it might be a good idea to use them on the website to improve branding. But if those colours do not provide enough contrast and readability you will be better off choosing something that is more pleasant to the eye.

The other important aspect about appearance is what we call as cross browser compatibility. In lay man terms, it means that your website should appear almost the same irrespective of which internet browser that the user uses to view your website. Since mobile browsing is also on the increase today, it might be a good idea to test your website on mobile devices as well.

It is a popular misconception that your home page should be jazzy to be attractive. Jazziness only adds to the distraction element and people do not like to view such items again and again. Avoid fast moving graphics, loud animations as far as possible. This is not going to be very useful i serious business websites.

What next?

Navigation is the third most important aspect. The navigation system allows the user to find the information that they are looking for from the website easily. It has to be intuitive since you are expecting the visitor to find that information themselves without any help. If they find it difficult to navigate they will simply drop out and you will lose out on that customer. While planning for navigation, try and keep the options to the minimum. Also the links and the menu labels should be very clear and direct so that the most users understand that in the same way.