For most of your visitors, your website will be their first point of contact with you or your business. As a result, it is important that your website makes a good first impression.

One way to make this good first impression is to have a well designed professional looking website. And regardless of whether or not you’ve hired someone to do do the job, it is important to verify that it does not look amateur.

Below we have listed a few things that your website should avoid.

1. Lots of Colors

There are a lot of beautiful colors out there. However, that does not mean that you should put them all on your website.

For a professional-looking website, colors should be kept to a minimum.

2. Centered Text

Centering might work well for certain headlines, images, or captions. However, you should avoid centering the bulk of your textual content. According to published research, users prefer to read from left to right. As a result, centering your text makes it more difficult for users to digest your content

3. Font Woes

There are many ways to convey amateurism by improperly using font. Here is what not to do:

* Use many different font faces

* Incorporate text of all sizes, as well as several variants or bold, italic, and underlined text

* Use multiple fonts colors

4. Excessive Use of Exclamation Points

There are better ways to convey excitement than by overusing punctuation. Remember, your website is not an infomercial.

5. Animation

Sometimes people include animated graphics to add excitement to a web page. Unfortunately, this conveys something very different. Sure, you might find your bouncing logo quite eye-catching, but you don’t want to distract users from your content or come across — once again — as an infomercial.

6. Too Much Content

While you might have a lot of things to say about your services or your company, it does not all need to be put on your website. Instead, try to find a concise way of summarizing your content and effectively describing what you can offer.

Additionally, if you have a lot of content which you feel should be included in your website, consider breaking it up into small pages, instead of cramming it all into one long slow-loading page.

In order for your website to be successful, it will have to inspire trust and confidence. As a result, you should keep these tips in mind when evaluating your website.

via Does Your Website Look Like An Amateur Built It? – Web Development Blog.

Visit Gregg at: http://www.3wdesign.com/

Door County Superhighways

This, my first real post here, is an experiment to see how many days it will take to show up in a “Door County, Wisconsin” Google Alert.

Because my company, 3W Design Group, is based in Door County, we have quite a few Door County clients.

For the past year we have been nagging on our clients to get with it and start blogging. There is no way faster to get your business in the Google pages than to blog. (verb) There have been points in the last 8 or 9 months where we will post in the morning and show up in a Google alert that same day. More recently we’ve been seeing a 2 to 3 day lag. This is still not close to bad. If you happen to keep up on things like this as we do, you’ll recall that it wasn’t more that 2 years ago that it would take a Door County business from 3 to 9 months before showing up in even a terrible ranking position of 100 or more.

On a different note, every web site owner in Door County wants to show up in Google when someone types in “Door County.” So (I’m guessing here) let’s say there are 500 business web sites in the county. There are 480 of those sites (sorry) that will not make it to the first page, or top 20. That presents quite a dilemma, hey? You need to email my wife and partner Barb. She’s got solutions for you.

So anyway, check back soon. Hopefully I’ll be reporting my results on this test early tomorrow. By the way, I didn’t do anything in this post or to my blog that you can’t do or I can’t help you do. No big tricks here. This has to be simple so we all can get our piece of the Google Door County pie!

Gregg