Enhancing Web Design & Presentation

Optimizing your reseller Web site will increase the usability and functionality of your business offerings. By enhancing your Web site's presentation, you can also enhance your sales. Good Web site design imparts the notion that your business is trustworthy to potential consumers. Your Web site design quality should thus purvey a professional, solid appearance or look and feel, and provide clear navigation that conveys respect for customers and implies a promise of good service.

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In designing a professional site, resellers must also be aware that misspelled or poorly written documents and difficult navigation communicates disregard of users. Resellers must remember that their only venue to convey their brand identity to most of their consumers lies with their Web site. Therefore the Web site must be intelligently designed, comprehensive, correct, and all marketing and sales collateral must be current and relevant.

Consumers expect up-front disclosure of all aspects of their customer relationship. A Web reseller's site must therefore reveal all costs associated with purchasing hosting services. The site should also be transparent about service set-up policies and about the immediacy of billing and account establishment.

An optimized site must also make tremendous strides in addressing the issue of slow server response time. Slow response times are often the worst inhibitor against Web usability. Many hosting reseller sites are graphic intensive, and unfortunately, while many of these sites look extremely professional through the use of rich and sleek graphics, they cause download delay. For this reason, Web host resellers should attempt to avoid bloated graphic design that is replete with too many graphics or too many big graphics. Resellers should seek professional design that encourages human interaction, but that avoids inefficiency in speed.

Resellers should remind their Web designers that since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps, Web pages can be no more than 3 KB if they are to download in one second; which is the required response time for the most effective hypertext navigation. According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, users do not keep their attention on the page if downloading exceeds 10 seconds. For this reason, Web host resellers should ensure that both their sales and technical support sites load quickly. Resellers must thus note that most Internet users require instant gratification.

Web sites should also be designed utilizing "consistent" design techniques. As a rule of thumb, there should be a consistent image of your brand identity, or logo, appearing on every page of your Web site. Brand identity should be built into the navigation bar and should appear prominently on the top of every Web page. Repetition of your brand identity equates to its reinforcement in the minds of consumers.

Another important Web design tactic involves the reduction and elimination of "link rot." Resellers should ensure that there are no dead hyperlinks throughout their site, and ensure that all links remain alive forever or at least forward to a live link. Because users are extremely annoyed by link rot, it in the interest of the reseller operation to eliminate all dead links within its site. The existence of link rot erodes the trustworthiness of your site, thereby hampering sales efforts.

By following some of these Web design tenets, resellers can improve the over-all operations of the Web site, stimulating users to invest in their hosting service.