How to Make Your Website Attractive  01/12/2016 12:00 AM The key word in this title is attractive. This does not equate to beautiful, or artistic, or aesthetically pleasing, although of course some folks might find your finished design to be so. To misquote a proverb: “Attraction is in the eye of the beholder”. It’s about being a welcoming sight (or site) for those people who you want to visit, and then use, your business. Therefore our first rule of attraction is: Appreciate your purpose in its creation Have a clear and specific objective in mind, together with a series of goals to help you achieve this, when using our terrific SITE123 tools to make your own website . Throughout the creation process, everything you do should be geared to helping you achieve that objective. Let’s go back for a moment to this starting point. Some folks set an objective of: “To present my business to potential customers”. Sorry – wrong! That’s what it will also achieve, if carefully constructed, but your objective is to get them to buy your products or use your services. Being impressed with the web design, and then shopping elsewhere, is not what you want! Make it quick to load and simple to navigate The first of these will probably diminish in importance the faster that download speeds become. However, that’s not yet the case for many of your prospective customers. In the past, before we became an internet generation, people would wait for days or even weeks for an order to be delivered. Asking them now to hang on for fifteen or twenty seconds while your pages appear seems like a lifetime. It’s good to view your site on a slow connection just to test the speed. Navigation needs to be as simple as you can make it, especially as it will be accessed on a range of different desktops, laptops, tablets and mobiles. How frustrating is it when you visit a site looking for a specific item or piece of information, only to have to fight your way through a seemingly endless procession of links? Or spending ages scrolling through unending paragraphs of uninteresting copy to get to the point where you wish to be? It’s also worth remembering that most people will enter your site by search engine and therefore might well not go first to your homepage. Therefore, each page viewed on its own should make clear sense and identify where they are. Finally, make sure the names you use for your links are clear and unambiguous. You don’t make sales by confusing potential customers. Coloring the impression you make It’s a no-brainer to use a color scheme in your website that ties in with that of your company itself. Do be careful though to make sure that these colors don’t hamper the chances of your visitors effectively using your site. Therefore, dark copy on dark tinted backgrounds, a series of clashing bold shades, an explosion of too many colors for the eye to be comfortable with, all hamper performance. Two final points Errors are not attractive. Yet if you design your own site, typos can slip through. This is because when checking, your sub-conscious simply remembers what you meant to say. Ask someone else to go through carefully and check for you. Finally, as you view your “finished” site, declutter where you can. Simplicity is attractive, especially when your site is being visited by busy folk who want doing business with you to be a swift and simple process. Working through these points allows you to make a website that does reflect your business but, more importantly, also does its job.