I get a lot of questions from people asking me how they should design their website. Most of the time these people are looking to sell things online or at least drive more qualified leads to their business. The best way to get started designing your a website is to ask yourself "What's the goal?". Maybe the goal is to sell a product, maybe it's to get a phone number. Whatever the case it's important to establish what you want your website to do for you before you get started.

No matter what you're looking to do online there are some rules of thumb that will give you a better chance to succeed. To get started I recommend you're careful not to overload your website with images. Images slow down your website because image files are much larger than text and take longer to load. Studies show you only have about 7 seconds from the time someone clicks on your site for your page to load. Otherwise they leave -- after all there are billions of webpages on the web and to sort through them your visitors have to move quickly. For this reason I don't recommend a lot of images on your homepage. Try to make it look attractive but without slowing down the loading time.

The next thing you need is a clear headline across the top of the page. Once that page is loaded people are going to want to know they came to the right place. Put a clear and concise headline across the top of your page just like a newspaper headline.

Once you have your headline it's important you have a call to action. A call to action is simply what you want your site visitor to do next. If they've come to the right place and they like what you have to say you need to tell them what to do next. It's hard to go wrong with a big, bright continue button. Just make sure you put it "above the fold". "Above the fold" means the person needs to be able to see the call to action without having to scroll. Some people won't be willing to scroll or won't know to scroll to figure out what to do next. Your job as a website builder is to eliminate these types of mysteries.

There are many other things you can  do to increase your conversion rates and boost sales. To learn more go ahead and bookmark this blog and subscribe to the WebStarts Youtube channel.