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Friday, 17 October 2014

Graphic Ideas to Design an Appealing Effective Website

Professional website designers frequently fall into the trap of giving too much focus on fancy graphics, "branding" and other elements which - while attractive - don't enhance the site's overall quality. If you're looking to design your own website, you need to consider exactly how the site will load for your visitor (regardless of the device they use), to ensure you get the maximum number of web leads.

You'll need to give some consideration to the images you'll be using. This may require calling on the assistance of a graphic designer, if you don't have the necessary skills & tools already. You want to be using images which are of high resolution (but compressed to minimise loading time) and which are consistent with the rest of your marketing materials. If your images are too large, resulting in long loading times, you'll lose the leads you worked so hard to attract in the first place!

For your blog posts, where possible, use captions to explain the image in more detail (in your blogs) - this is also an excellent place for your selected keywords to be included. For general website content, you want to be sure the images are fairly self explanatory - if not, the image (no matter how good it looks!) will distract your reader, possibly confuse them, and cause them to leave the page.

Also, be super cautious with the images you use - while it's very easy to copy high quality images from Google image searches, chances are you'll run into some issues with copyright infringements if you're not careful. Ensure the images are public domain or that you've purchased them from a reputable stock images site such as Shutterstock.

Finally avoid any images which may cause offence to your target audience. Nudity, violence or "dark humour" should be avoided to maximise your conversion from web visitor to web lead.

A general rule of thumb with your images is "less is more". If you use consistent graphics on your site, minimising your file sizes and avoiding copyright or offensive images, you'll be increasing your chances of attracting qualified leads to your web site... along with your chances of keeping those web leads on your page!