Some of this has been covered in the layout design tips, but this will be a little more in depth. A good place to start is take a look at some the other major sites on the internet. Look what they have done to "catch" interest and how they have formated there page. For home page content, give a 30 second overview of what you can or offer and why the viewer should buy from you. You can and of course should include more content than that. Why do this? Most people visiting your site probably won't be a direct vistor, they will be coming from a search engine. People who are searching for information are ussually in a hurry. So, you need to be able to prove to them in a hurry why the should stay are your site. Longer sections of text should be broken up with images, graphs, ect. If you do have a large amount of text split it on two or as many pages as needed, place a continue/next link on the bottom of the page. A good place to see this in action is MSNBC, they ussually have there content no much more than double to triple the length of the page, and if it is longer then spill the content onto another page. It is also good to break up the text with images, graphics, graphs, ect. But, don't make the images too big, generally a size of 200x300 is appropriate, if you need a larger image, it's best to either use a mouseover image enlarge or click to see larger, a solution to both can be found at http://solutionsforofficelive.com/imageenlarge.aspx. What about colors and styles? For colors, going subtle is ussually best, if you have a white background go with a dark grey for text. The Site Designer has several different theme colors you can chose from. Once you have a "theme" whether that be one you designed or a Office Live theme stick with it, don't use one theme on one page and another theme on another page. For fonts, stick with one, maybe 2 different font types, generally Arial or Times New Roman is best. Again keep the design consistent using Arial font will guarantee you compatibility with 99% of all browsers. If you need help checking what colors go with each other, check this service: http://www.easyrgb.com/harmonies.php. Using CSS, you can also change the background to something other than white, using the harmonies checker you can tell what colors will go best. If you are going to include animations, gif's, ect, keep it simple and generally only have it repeat a few times. It is also best to stay away from blinking or flashing animations, they are generally anoying! Do not use the HTML module for your content! The reason this is important, is because search engines can not read the contents of a Office Live HTML module. And if they can not read it; the search engine can not index. Which could lead to a keyword spamming since none of your keywords can be found, this is dicussed farther in the SEO section. |