When you are on the brink of ordering your new website it is extremely important to think carefully about your goals. Are you looking to sell products or services, are you wanting to show off your work or perhaps you are looking an interactive solution. Each of these options would require a different type of website, with a different look and feel.

Once you have your own clear vision, you need to communicate your requirements to your website designer, for this reason it is important to find a local web design company that will enable you to meet and talk face to face about the project. You will of course be partially relying on your website designer, but its your website and you need to be 100% it will do what you need it to do, so here are some of the things you need to look out for:

1. Keep colour choices simple, the colour scheme can make or break the site, overdo it and visitors will be put off, under do it and your site won’t stand out.

2. No matter how tempting, do not use sounds or moving images on your site as they will distract your visitors from the important information you want them to see!

3. It is very important that your website is not slow to load, if it is, visitors are likely to look elsewhere. The biggest cause of slow load times are images that have not been correct sized and optimized for the web.

4. Finding a good blend of text and images is crucial, too much text and visitors will lose interest in reading it, too many images and users will not find the information they seek.

5. Navigation is very important, menu systems should be easy to use and pages setup to provide quick and easy access to the information a visitor is looking for. One of the worst examples are website where it is very difficult to find the “contact us” page, this is a school boy error and will have visitors leaving quickly!

6. Keep your information up to date, visitors find it very annoying when they find exactly the product or service they want, only to find you no longer offer it!

7. Test to make sure all the site function are working!

A good Website designer is usually pretty good at what they do, but never forget, this will ultimately be your website and you need to ensure you feel it offers your visitors the experience you would expect.