Website Feng-Shui (Make Your Website Surfable)

Step 5. Design your site to make it surfable (Website Feng-Shui)

If you are creating a website to make money off CPC Advertising then you don’t have to really worry about this step as your goal is to get people to click away from your site (click advertisements) so you get paid.

On the other hand, if you do want people to spend time on your site then you really want to think and research into what type of design you want.

You can think of site design as feng-shui for a functional room. You put things that you look for alot in places where you can easily reach them (Compare the light switch to the menu bar).

Put less-used items tucked away somewhere else, where you know where it’ll be, but don’t want it exactly in sight (Like how the trash is usually always under the kitchen sink… you might want to put some secondary links at the bottom of your page).

The most effective thing you can do to start designing your site is:

1. Look at other sites similar to your niche, which have designs you find functional and appealing.
2. Sketch out the “framework” for your website on a piece of paper.

Its alot easier to put a design down with pencil and paper, and once you have something good down on paper you can strive to turn it into HTML.

Trust me, its way easier this way.

There are a few different layouts used for different purposes.

For example, one website which uses a common theme for commercial services is SunPower, a solar panel manufacturer.

They have specifically thought out what exactly their customer wants. A potential customer will either be from the government, business, or homeowners sector, and they have those bases covered for any one of those potential customers logging onto their site.

Here is another example from A List Apart, an informative resource for web designers.

We can see that it is very simple and uses alot of whitespace. Whitespace is like a clean desk that we can lay out our complicated calculus homework on to slowly let the painful process of acquiring quixotic-seeming knowledge sink in.

AKA – it keeps you focused on the important information.

So before you start working on your design, go out, find websites that you enjoy using, and that are easy to use, and analyze what makes these websites so user friendly.