You may think that the layout of a website is often more a case of design than judgment, and in a lot of cases this is true. However, as a marketing tool, your website design should use sound marketing sense to ensure you convert more hits to sales and enquiries.
Where you place content on your site is crucially important. Research has proven that content placed in certain areas on your web page is more likely to get read and ‘clicks’ that potentially the very same content elsewhere on the page. As you would expect, different research has given different results.
Also important, is accepting web standards and what your visitors expect. Trying to be different is great in theory, but not if it makes navigating or accessing the content of your site more difficult for your visitors.
Common lines of thought are as follows:
Menus to the left, or top
This is standard practise and is what most people look for and expect on a site. Trying to be clever with obscure menu systems can be detrimental to the sites success.
Logos
Predominately, logos are expected to be in the top-left of the web page as this is what you this is the first element you would want people to see in the western culture of reading from left to right, top to bottom. Logos should also be links back to the website home page.
Contact page
A contact page must be easily accessible. Your visitors will not search for long for a method of contact, they will simply visit another website where contact is made easier!
Call to action
A call to action is content which encourages the visitor to act. Most research shows that these are best placed on the right hand side of the web page. An example of a call to action is ‘Request a Quote’, ‘Register Online’ or ‘Buy Now’.
Summary
It is important to include a summary of your entire page content in the top left, or first paragraph of the text area. Remember that your visitors may not want to read all the content and the first paragraph may be all you have to encourage them to read on.