Business web site design

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Continued...

Keep it clean
By this I mean organised and easy on the eye - a site that is too 'busy' can become hard to concentrate on and a user can easily miss vital areas of important text. When building a website try using 'line-height' (css) to increase the space between each line of text, you can also put some well placed images on your page to nicely break up the text, dont be afraid of leaving whitespace between articles/images - this will quickly make a page easier to read and more 'comfortable' to look at, borders and background colours can be used to seperate important articles and other information and make them stand out on your site.

Dont waffle!
The easier it is for your customers to find what they want on your site the higher your chances of converting the visit into a sale, so keep all text areas short, simple and to the point.

Back yourself up
If you are selling a service or product and want to gain trust and respect from potential buyers or clients the best way is to provide some form of evidence that you can actually offer a good product or service - Portfolio's of recent work will serve this purpose, as well as testimonials from happy customers, write-up's from magazines or news articles, any awards gained and so on ....

Font Appeal
There's an abundance of fonts doing the rounds these days and the majority of them should never be used on your website, you need to make sure that the font you use is clean, easy to read, and viewable by all - just because you have 'comic sans' installed on your PC it doesnt mean everyone else does too!
Using css you can offer an alternative font though if the viewer doesn't have your font of choice.

Some fonts you cant go wrong with:
Arial - Excellent for good clear text (it was, however actually designed for print)
Helvetica - Mainly installed on mac's neat and modern looking
Verdana - Sometimes confused with arial renders well, looks crisp and professional
Times new roman - Pretty much everyone has it installed
Georgia - serif font with rounded lines thats quickly becoming popular on a lot of web 2.0 sites


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