Recently, a Stanford University study showed that the number one reason a visitor would leave a website is the design.

What this means to you is that if you're not a professional Web designer, you better at least learn the basics of Web design if you're serious about making a profit from your website and start generating income online. Let's look at some of the basics in Web design.

First of all, can the visitors navigate around your page? This is the most important question to keep in mind while you're creating your website. Web design is all about making it easy for visitors. If you're looking for something more complicated than just having it set up as one long sales letter, you will need to have a menu bar or a navigation panel easily accessible and placed above your content.

Menus are also good in helping the visitor know where they're at. It should be clear what your website is and what it's about from the moment that they land on your page.

Navigating your page should be easy. Visitors shouldn't have to click multiple times to go to a new page. Definitely, "Are you sure?" boxes are a big no-no in Web design unless the user is navigating away from your page.

Menus also help the visitor to know they are at the right place. When a visitors lands on your website it should be clear to them what your website is about.

Good font choices are also a must in Web design. You don't want your words to be too small, so you should use at the very least the 10 point size. Also, don't get crazy with using fancy or specialty fonts. All too often, you will wind up with gibberish and boxes.
Another Web design concern with fonts is just how easy they are to read. The sans serif fonts like Verdana and Arial are the best to use on Web pages. They're the easiest on the eyes. The serif fonts like Courier and Times New Roman are all well and good on paper, but are much harder to read on a screen.
Above all, do not use blinking text! Besides being the hardest thing ever to read, that whole thing was used up in the 90's.

You should also make good use of your blank space. If your page is heavily loaded with text, it's going to be hard to read, even if you have the best ever font configuration.

You will also want to use short paragraphs. You might remember in your English classes that it takes at least three sentences to make a paragraph. You can fudge this rule if you have to.

You can also use subheadings, bullets, pics and graphics to break up your text. Most people will only scan over pages, so your message should be short, sweet, and to the point.

With that in mind, don't go crazy with the graphics and design to the point of neglecting your words. Even if you have the best design, you can lose thanks to a badly written sales page.

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