If you use landing pages or your own website as part of your affiliate marketing plan, then you need to make sure that those pages and sites are as optimized as possible to make you money. There is a LOT of bad web design out there, and the bald faced truth of it is that bad web design often automatically equals bad profits. Your campaigns just won’t do as well as you want them to if you don’t support them with quality, user friendly websites in the process.

For this installment in my ongoing Back to Basics series, we’re going to look at a few rules of thumb for designing websites. Some of these are likely things you’ve heard before, but they always bear repeating so you have them in mind next time you’re building a page. And for anyone just starting out with landing pages and suchlike, they’ll help get you started off on the right foot. The goal here is to make a site that your visitors can easily navigate in order to give you their money in one way or another, and if you implement these suggestions, you may find they do just that for your own sites.

This time around, we’re going to focus on general readability and navigation type issues. In future pieces, we’ll look at various other aspects as necessary.

• Don’t be annoying. No, really – don’t be annoying. Think of the most annoying things you encounter in your day to day travels around the web, and then don’t do them. Music that plays automatically, enormous flashing animated gifs, anything that blinks – all of these things can be incredibly annoying to your users, and they’re not necessary, anyway. Bells and whistles can be used, but you must use them judiciously. For example, a well placed scrolling marquee that displays your most recent tweets can fit in well, but a random scrolling marquee babbling not much of anything useful is just that: not useful.
• Cut down on clicks. Put as few clicks as possible between your visitor and closing the deal. If you are getting a user via AdWords, they’ve already had to click on your ad to be taken to your site, so don’t make them click around your site 17 times in order to complete the transaction. They’ll get bored – or annoyed – and wander off before you know it.
• Use pop-ups judiciously, too. They can be effective, but try to remember the last time a pop-up made you jump for joy – having a hard time? There’s a reason for that: pop-ups annoy people. And you’re not supposed to be annoying.




• Avoid background images. There’s a reason many of the most popular websites on the Internet have nice, plain backgrounds. Plain backgrounds are easier on the eyes, make the page load faster, keep the site design looking open and clean, and make things easier to read. If you really want to use an image, then go for something subtle and tasteful that in no way compromises the readability or usability of your page.




• Make it quick. Just as you want to get right to the point with your copy, and you want to minimize the amount of clicks necessary to close a deal, you also want your site to load quickly. Experiment with compressing images, yanking unnecessary scripts, shortening pages, etc, to cut down on load time.




• Size matters. Don’t make your page too wide, or too skinny. You want everything to fit nicely on the most common monitor sizes so no one has to scroll sideways to see all your stuff. Likewise, keep your text lines to no wider than 600px. And speaking of size, pay attention to your font sizes, too. 12px is good for standard text. Any smaller, and it gets too hard to read. Go too much bigger, and you look like you’re shouting, even if you’re not using all caps.




• Mind the gap. And by “gap,” I mean the line spacing or leading. Good spacing improves readability, giving the eyes a place to rest briefly before moving on to the next paragraph, or preventing the paragraphs themselves from looking cramped and unattractive.




• Don’t underline anything, unless it’s a link. Having a url underlined as a way to let people know it’s a link is a standard convention we’ve been using for years. When people see text underlined on a page, they automatically think it’s a link. If you underline something that isn’t a link, you’re confusing people – don’t do that.




• Navigation, navigation, navigation. Don’t let your readers get lost in a corn maze. You definitely want them to click around and check out your stuff if they want to do that, but always, always give them a clear, easy way to get back to the home page on each sub page in your website, whether you have a standard nav bar on every page or just a home button.

Some of these things are common sense, of course, but judging from the number of really badly designed sites out there, these are things people really need to hear. The most important thing is really to stop and think like a “regular user” – not like a marketer – for part of the time you’re designing your pages. You’ll need your marketing hat on for a portion of the design time, of course, but set aside some time to really look at things the way a random visitor would see them. And if you’re not confident in your own judgment on that one, get a non-marketer friend or family member to tell you what they think about your design.