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7 ways to keep your website design from sucking 
By: Dustin Dickens
A great website is within the grasp of most people to build. Staying focused and understanding your goals is very important. In doing so, you will make the site more easily manageable and concise.
If the website actually does anything, say for example allow users to download a super important PDF file, then it should do it well. It should do it over and over again without fail. It should also be easy for the visitor to figure out how to use. This may sound like the obvious, but all to often I go to a site that has the potential to be a great one, but then they drop the ball at the crucial moment. So, test, test, and test some more.
The Information Architecture (IA) is possibly one of the most critical areas of the design of a site. The IA is basically how the site will be laid out, and how the visitor will be asked to navigate it. How will the navigation links be displayed? What resources should be placed on the index home page versus secondary pages? When a visitor comes to the site what are they looking for and how easy is it to find? When you are visiting a truly exceptional website, you never think about these questions. You simply look for a moment, then flow to where you want to be next. That is what great IA is about.
The style and aesthetics of the website will have a lot to do with how well you connect emotionally with your visitors. Excellent sites know their audience and are designed accordingly. You wouldn't do an ultra modern theme with techno music for a deli, and you wouldn't do a grunge style website for a fortune 500 company. High valued sites make their visitors feel comfortable and in their element.
A slow Load time for a website is always a sure way to lose a visitor before they even get to your website. They teach this in every basic website design course from here to China, but getting that fat content out there is just too tempting. Video and bump'n Flash animations are all the rage, but they have to be used where and when appropriate or they will cause more harm than good. A great site has a great load time.
Great content will always be the corner stone of any great website. Offer timely and valid information and people will value your site. This can be in the form of images, text, music, schedules, etc...I can't stress enough how important this is.
A major part of content being perceived as quality has to do with how current it is. You have to make sure your content it as current as possible. Outdated site content is a common mistake that can take a once very relevant and often visited website and turn it into a ghost site. Your content isn't quality if it isn't current.
Ensuring a visitors security while they are just visiting or making an online purchase is of the utmost importance. Exceptional sites go the extra mile to assess the risks that their visitors might encounter while visiting and do everything they can to both disclose and mitigate those risks.
Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles
Who is this guy? Dustin Dickens is a website designer who thinks his site doesn't suck!
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