By web design, I refer to all key elements of a website, which make your visitors have a pleasant browsing experience.

1) The importance of the About and Contact pages.

You are after converting your visitors into paying customers, right? You will never accomplish this if you don’t offer clear and precise information about who you are and how you can be reached. Keep these two pages simple and clean, and make them as visible as possible.

2) Don’t write too much text on a page.

Many studies have show that most readers lose focus after two or three paragrahps. Try to pick your words and transmit only the essential.

3) Pay attention to screen resolution.

The most common resolution is still 1024×768. You really don’t want your users to scroll down or horizontally to see important information. Although it is hard to believe, some of your visitors don’t even know how to scroll properly, and might abandon your site very quickly if they find it hard to browse through.

4) Ask your web designer about a good menu structure.

Weigh out all your options, but keep in mind the important information must be accessed in no more than 3 clicks. Statistically it is better to have the menus in the upper part of the screen – that’s where a visitor looks first.

5) Don’t use colors that burn your retina.

Don’t overdo it with animations or distracting banners. While you might get some clicks in the beginning, on the long term you will tire the visitors and grow your bounce rate.

6) Keep an eye on browser compatibility.

People use different browsers for different reasons. Your visitors will definetly abandon your website, rather than change the browser. Most popular browsers these days are Chrome, Mozilla and Internet Explorer.

7) Your website should be 100% resposive.

At least until you develop a phone app around your service/product. Recent figures show 1 in 2 people browses websites from the mobile phone. This is not a joke, you’re in peril of losing 50% of your audience.

8) Forget about pop-up.

Users don’t like them and browsers almost unanimously block them.

Ionut Popescu is Business Development Manager at MBM Software