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| e-Commerce
Opportunity in Foreign Trade
Elements
of a Well-Designed Home Page
Okay,
you've finally made it. Your web-site
is or at least the home page is
ready. We shall discuss here essential
items your home page should have
as home page is the most important
page in your whole site. A visitor
(and potential customer) who reaches
your site for the first time, will
decide inside of 30 seconds whether
to read on or press the stop button.
If you or your designer is new in
web design, resist the temptation
to spring surprise on unsuspecting
visitors ! Remember, you are designing
a business site and the visitor
is looking for something useful.
Think yourself as a visitor and
choose content accordingly.
A well-designed home page has the
following characteristics:
1.It provides an overview of what
is available on the site, and every
section of the site can be reached
from the home page, either directly
or with no more than 2 or 3 clicks.
2. It looks attractive and projects
the right image for the company,
but it still loads in a reasonably
short amount of time. A balance
must be reached between whizzy graphics
and fast page loading.
3.It reinforces the branding of
the company or product, so visitors
instantly know what site they have
landed on.
4.It shares certain elements with
all the other pages of the site,
so that the pages all fit together,
and visitors get a sense of the
pages belonging to one site, rather
than being a bunch of unrelated
pages.
5. A home page usually includes
a small amount of content, even
if only a brief description of the
company, but its main purpose is
as a list of links to other pages
where the real content resides.
A home page is much like the table
of contents in a book or magazine.
Most
business home pages will have the
following links:
>> Our Products and Services
>> How
to Contact Us
Any site that also sells products
online should have another:
Order Here !
The fewer clicks required to get
to your ordering page, the more
orders you are likely to get - it's
a statistical fact. Put your ordering
page one click away from the home
page (and perhaps from every other
page as well). Actually, it's probably
better to call the link "How to
Order" or some such, and make it
clear to the user that they have
not committed themselves to ordering
anything until the credit card number
is submitted. A well-designed site
offers the following no-pressure
button:
Add to Shopping Cart (You can
always remove it later)
Most sites, of course, will have
more than the above-mentioned four
navigational items on their home
page. What you have there depends
on the purpose of your site. Whatever's
important, whatever you want people
to see, should be right there, not
buried several levels down.
Resist the temptation to give your
navigational titles clever but ambiguous
names. Of course you don't have
to stick to the plain vanilla examples
above.
>> Where
to Find Us
The purpose of your site is to provide
information, not to entertain with
word games. So, choose your content
with care - not everything you like.
That approach is OK for personal
home page - not in business sites.
Do your users a favor and make it
clear what they'll get when they
click on a link. If your site features
downloadable files, audio or video
links, or other bandwidth hogs,
list the file size next to each
link so users will know what they're
getting into. Inform.
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