Website Design - 3 Top Mistakes To Avoid

Online business is alive and well. Webmasters build websites to promote products and information while making a steady at home income. The main sources of making money online are affiliate marketing websites and blogs that do product reviews, or provide flagship information on a variety of topics.

Blogs are a very popular platform because they are regularly updated and the RSS technology they use can attract a good amount of traffic and readers. Whichever platform is used, whether it is a static site or a dynamic blog the traffic potential and exposure of the Internet continues to be one of the best promotional methods to make money.

Most of the people who are succeeding with an online business are not professional web designers, but are novices who utilize many of the easy website builders that require absolutely no programming or code experience. Many use the Wordpress blog building software, which is free and very user friendly. In reality the only requirements for success in online business is the willingness to work hard and learning correct techniques in website design and promotion.

Not all websites are created equal. Some webmasters build sites that just will never succeed for a variety of reasons. The mistakes they make are pretty fundamental and can mean the difference between success and failure. When learning how to make a website it is important to get a solid foundation and understanding and avoid the mistakes that many make that lead to disaster.

3 Basic Mistakes Webmasters Make When Building Websites

1. Navigation and Colors

A bad website design is one of the most typical mistakes and can cost you money because the traffic leaves as quickly as it comes and navigation is one of the most important elements of the design.

The navigation of the site should always be clear, simple and easy to follow. Visitors should be able to easily go to any page on your site and a good linking structure is crucial to that end.

Navigation menus should be in either of 3 places, the left sidebar, a top menu navigation bar, or in the right sidebar. The background color of the navigation bar links should be one that separates it from the other parts of the site, but still compliment the overall site colors.

The text of the navigation links should be opposite of the background color. So if the background is dark the link text color should be light and vice versa. Not all browsers and computers show colors the same way and using a dark background make it harder for some visitors to read.

The menus should be clear, and webmasters should avoid complicated drop down menus, remember that the average visitor is not a pro but a novice. Visitors should be able to surf your site and easily access all the pages of your website, this is the best way to ensure that they remain browsing your site for some time.

2. Low or No Content

Lack of content is one of the biggest mistakes made by webmasters. Sites that are thin affiliate sites do not do well in the search engines and most people are searching for information online. It is also a fact that they quality of information your provide gives credibility and makes it more likely that the visitor will buy a product that you recommend, rather that reaching a webpage that mostly has banners and ads that do not nothing to gain he confidence of the shopper.

3. Too Many Ads and Banners

Another mistake is to have a lot of ads and banners on the site. No one wants to swim through tons of advertisements to find what your site promises. The banners and Adsense should compliment your site and not be the main focus.