5 Important Rules in Website Design

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are five important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1. Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2. Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3. Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4. Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5. Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

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Navigating to your Free Shared Hosting Add Ons

Quick install of Value Added Web Applications on your Shared Hosting is great! But not if you are having trouble locating where they are.

Here we present a tutorial on navigation to the Value Added Applications for your Shared Web Hosting Accounts.

First visit the Domains at Retail Home Page and Log In.

Once logged in, you are presented with your main Welcome Screen. On your main welcome screen hover over Hosting & Email, and click Web Hosting & Databases.

You will then be presented with a list of your hosting accounts your currently have with Domains at Retail. Click “Open “ on the Hosting Account you want to install a Value Added Application on.

From here you will be taken to your Hosting Control Center.

At this point on the top right you can see a Direct Link entitled “Value Applications“. Click that link and you will be directly taken to the Value Applications page.

Alternatively, you can click the content tab:

The content section will expand open and look like this:

From there you may also click the “Value Applications” button.

Both links will take you to this page, where you will further be able to browse through the list of many web applications you can install for free.

Look around and see what you like. Our Value Applications page will let you know if the hosting you currently have purchased will support the Value Added Application you wish to choose.

For some of our popular Add ons, visit our previous Blog post on Free Shared Web Hosting Software Addons.

Check back often to find tutorials on how easy it is to install some our value added applications like Joomla and Wordpress!

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