A well designed website can bring you many benefits. For example, you may make more sales because of the professional image that you are projecting with your website. You may also receive more traffic from the search engines because your site has a well organized hierarchy. Here is a quick guide to help you set up a quality website quickly.

Web design guidelines:

Guideline 1: Have a well organized user menu.

The user menu of the website can go on the header, or by the sides (left or right) of your website. This is the navigation menu that your site visitors use to move through your web pages. Keep everything well organized. If you have many pages on your website, setup parent categories. Then move all content under different categories. On the navigation menu, the child pages should appear under the parent categories.

For instance, you may be selling mobile phones on your website. You can organize the brands as parent categories, then place the models under each brand. Visitors will find it easy to locate the brand that they are looking for.

Guideline 2: Use contrasting colors for links and texts.

Try not to use similar colors for your links and texts. That will confuse visitors and they won't know where to click. If you are not sure what colors to use for your links, just leave them as the default blue color. Most visitors are used to blue links, and they usually have no problems identifying underlined blue texts as links.

Guideline 3: Use a faint background for easy reading.

You want your visitors to stay on your website as long as possible. So use faint colors as your background so that it's easier to read the texts on your web pages. A color scheme with black background and red texts can hurt the eyes. Visitors tend to leave these sites very quickly. White background with black texts is the safest option. You can try to be a bit hip and fanciful if you like, but always try reading the texts yourself. If you find it tiring to read the content, then the colors are wrong.

Guideline 4: Keeping things simple.

On the Internet, most people just scan the content because they want to know if you have what they are looking for. So don't create lengthy content that beat around the bush. Be direct. If you are selling mobile phones, then most likely your visitors are looking for information related to the specs of the handsets. So give the information to your visitors upfront.

Guideline 5: Contact information.

Finally, don't forget to include your contact information. If possible, set up a contact form so that visitors can send you emails directly. Many sales are made on the Internet through email. So don't underestimate this powerful tool. If you have the resources, setup a phone line as well. But make sure that the line is manned and doesn't just go to an automated voice message.

As your website grows, you will have more and more web pages. Navigating on the site can become confusing. Setup a site map with links to all the pages so that visitors can locate the right pages quickly.