Minisite Design – Some Mistakes You Must Avoid

As soon as the importance of good minisite design sinks in, the entrepreneurs are almost rushing through the process of having one of their own. However, while doing so in hurry, the webmasters or website proprietors often end up making some common mistakes. Here those are for you to learn and avoid :

Going without a plan:

It tops the list of mistakes when you don’t have any plan in regards to minisite structure and design including navigation and links. 

No keyword research: 

The priority of online marketing is to top the result pages in the search engines and a way to do that is to optimize your minisite on the basis of a set of keywords. In any minisite structure, keywords work like pillars. If this important step is missed, the entire structure will collapse. Never choose a keyword that nobody searches, otherwise your web business will fail. Focus on those keywords that are frequently searched and attract leads to your website. Use Goodkeywork, Wordtracker or Google keyword suggestion tool for this purpose.

Too much loading time for minisite: 

If it takes more time to load, the visitors will lose their patience. We are living in an age when nobody is ready to wait for long. If it takes less time to load and navigation between pages is simple and quick, the visitors will be happy to hit the button. 

Stuffing of minisite layout: 

Make sure not to clutter your minisite design. There should not be too much of graphics, flash animation, images and any other type of bells and whistles. Those will be fine to attract the children in kindergarten but are never a good idea to engage traffic and mint money. The use of flash animations, JavaScirpts and graphics should be limited. The search engines like keywords, keyphrases and quality of content. So, don’t waste your time on catchy images. Despite their relevance, they won’t be valued by Google. 

Heavy dependence on WYSIWYG HTML editors: 

 Don’t be too much dependent on Mozilla Firefox, Frontpage or any other WYSIWYG HTML editor. If you use them, you could have your minisite designed at one side of the screen instead of get it positioned at the center. Positioning is important as wrong alignment will mar the purpose of even a decently designed and perfectly keyword-optimized minisite. 

Exceeding 750 pixels: 

Limit your use of pixels to 750. Going beyond that is not prohibited but the visitors never like scrolling from side to side. Alternatively, you can use percentage of screen and not pixels. However, take care that it is not narrowed down to less than 650 pixels. 

No knowledge of color choice and harmony: 

Have you considered emotion of colors while developing your minisite design? If your layout has a dark background, never use dark colors. Even a light color on a heavily dark background won’t work well. Consider using dark colors on a white background, such contrast will offer better readability. Understand how different colors will leave effect on your target visitors. If you want red in your website content, use it with caution and sparingly (for headings and sub-headings). Without exceptional expertise, don’t use black or grey. Maintain a lot of white space as fewer peepers and more salt will give some much-loved relief to the visitors.