Your Website Should be The Same As All The Others

There is no question that your website should reflect your business ethos and priorities. Have a look at some solicitor websites and then compare them to websites for dating or children's books … you'll soon see a significant difference in the application of style, colour and the ratio of written and graphical content.

One area where a lot of first time website designers fall down is their failure to appreciate that reflecting radical, new and different concepts by manipulating website navigation and layout is often not a good idea and, indeed, can be quite harmful to your web presence.

All of this is summed up in Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience which states that

users spend most of their time on other websites.

which in turn means that if your website operates significantly differently from those the user will feel out of their comfort zone and potentially be unable to interact with the site.

Examples of this include having menus on the right hand side, having links that are hidden or only show you what they are when you hover over them or having pages where you have to scroll to the bottom of the screen for navigation links.

Keeping your website to a common layout and focusing on style and content will be a much better way of making sure your customers have the ability and confidence to interact with your pages.