Good Digital Design

    You’ve spent some time giving thought to your new business office layout: Where each item will go and how it will “fit” into the scheme of your overall décor.  You have also laid out a set of “office procedures” that will guide your operations in the direction that you want the business to function in an orderly fashion.  Have you thought of everything?

     Your website is where your business resides in the digital world -- it's like the digital headquarters of your offline company. Hence, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible. And that it reflects the overall ‘décor” of your business functions.

     Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.  You wouldn’t want to invite people to your “brick n mortar” store and not have them figure out how to walk from your reception area into your private office, would you?  You want the same “mobility” to your digital office on your website.

     Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size. If people can’t get your site to download in a few seconds --- they are GONE!

     Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into several individual paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.  Keep this in mind even if your information is vitally necessary for the customer to read and understand your business operations.

     Make sure your website complies to web standards found at https://www.w3.org/standards/ and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox, Chrome, or Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors. This means losing out on a lot of prospective profits!

     Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.  Your purpose is to make a “universal” website that can be accessed by as many people as possible.

     Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML.  CSS is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and JavaScript.

     You want your site to be beautiful and draw the attention of your visitors; however, your site must also be functional and operate on the best possible levels with whatever browser your potential customer is using.  In this way your digital office will function at its optimum and will continue to provide you with new customers and growing revenues.

QUOTE TO CONSIDER

THOUGHTFUL GEM

"Why do you not have time to do it right,

but you have time to do it over?"