12 Design Tips For A Successful Website
Keywords: small business marketing, small business web design, web design, web traffic
Here are 12 design tips every small business owner should know when designing a new website. Put simply, they will determine whether your site receives traffic and converts to sales or not.
1. Know Your Audience
Be very clear about your target audience and ask key questions which will affect the design. What % of the audience is likely to have DSL or Broadband as this will affect whether you use large files. What % is likely to be elderly as this will affect the font size. What % are young versus older as this will affect the tone of voice.
2. Fast Loading
Around 80% of web traffic comes from search engines. That means people land on your site and expect to find what they want quickly. Ensure the homepage loads within a maximum of seven seconds. If users have to wait for your page to load, they will bounce off the site and go to the next site that appeared on the search result list.
3. Clarity
The purpose of your site and what you are selling should be clear within 7-10 seconds. If a user needs to click on a link or play with the navigation in order to figure out what you are selling, you will lose visitors in large numbers.
4. Less is More
A simple and uncluttered site with a single-minded message on each page makes for the best web experience. Avoid trying to include too much information on one page. Ask yourself, What is the one thing I want the visitor to think and then do on this page.
5. Avoid Design Overload
Avoid filling your site with lots of whizzy graphic devices. Certainly avoid music in the background - if it does not annoy the visitor in the first visit, it certainly will in the second. Never have more than one animated device on a page as it is too distracting.
6. Showcase the Product
If you are selling a beautiful product such as a golf course, a resort, hotel or restaurant, avail of the latest macro flash technology. Flash viewers are now ubiquitous with almost 90% of browsers containing the plug-in. Use this to showcase your product, as small photos often will not do your product justice.
7. Simple Navigation
Navigation should be simple and intuitive. A child should be able to immediately understand how to find the information. A person visiting your site should never be more than three clicks away from what they want.
8. Comparison
You should always keep an eye on what your competitors and the companies you aspire to emulate are doing on their websites. Bookmark them all and visit once a month. Incorporate any new ideas from their site into your site.
9. Online Sales
If you are selling on your site, ensure your users are never more than two clicks away from ordering the product.
10. On Brand
In a few words, describe the personality of your brand. Ask yourself what tone of voice and what kind of experience your customers expect online. Ensure your web designers understand how to translate your offline brand to your website. Ask them how they will go about it.
11. Visitors and Conversion Data
Ensure you have web-tracking software, which will tell you:
How many visitors go to the site daily
What town, region or country they are from
How many get past the home page and what pages they tend to look at or rarely visit
What % of visitors convert to sales
This is vitally important data to help you refine your website. For example, if you discover that only 20% of visitors go beyond the homepage, that is a big issue. Or if you can see that very few users visit a key page that explains the benefits of your product, your conversion rate will be low. This information provides the guidance you need to refine and optimize your site design.
12. Think of Traffic
Finally, and most importantly, always design your site with traffic in mind. Many small businesses make the mistake of designing their website and then start thinking about driving traffic to it. The problem is that the way you design your site can result in your site being ignored by the search engine spiders, meaning you will receive very little traffic. (It is estimated that for a typical site, 80% of web traffic tends to come from search engines). When designing your site, improve your SEO (search engine optimization) performance by ensuring you avoid the certain pitfalls. Ask your marketing agency to confirm that they have avoided the following:
Avoid flash sites. Sites are designed in either HTML or flash. Search engine spiders sent to index your site cannot read flash.
No frames. Spiders cannot read what is inside a frame, so you will not be indexed and noticed by search engines.
No dynamic pages. Some sites are developed with a database which generates dynamic pages. You can tell if there are dynamic pages on your site if there is a ? within the page URL. Again, spiders cannot read dynamic pages.
Text within graphics. To ensure text is read uniformly by different browsers, design agencies often put text within a graphic. It looks great. However, a spider cannot read what text that is in a graphic and simply moves on.
Evan Mangan is a former Head of European Marketing for Yahoo! Mobile and is MD of www.MarketingSmallBusiness.co.uk , a marketing agency which makes major brand marketing techniques available to smaller companies. For more marketing guides visit www.MarketingSmallBusiness.co.uk
Previous Articles Highlighter:
Beading Basics: What You Need To Know To Get Started Beading (1)
Check online or at your local craft store for lots of great, free beading patterns and beading ideas. Once you have mastered the art of beading, you will be making attractive jewelry, and you will naturally gravitate to other beading projects.
Jet Charter For Your Ultimate Vacation Plan (2)
This is sorely a private meeting as you are thousands of feet in the air. Rearing To Hop On A Jet? If you have done some search online or offline, you probably know that there are no lack of jet charter services out there for you to choose from.
Commodities Trading 101 - Do You Know The Basics Of Commodities Trading? (3)
These things include taxes, inflation and money supply. Politics, weather, transportation and its costs and technology and its changes can have an effect as well. Other than this the different kinds of commodities affect it as well.
How To Find Cheap Gas Online (4)
Keywords: gas prices, cheap gas, fuel prices Gas prices have gone crazy in the last few years and it's not very likely that they'll go down. We all need to keep on driving, so there's not much you can do.
Article Writing - 4 Things All Articles Must Have - Don't Forget! (5)
They dictate a lot in the success and the drive of traffic into one's site. It has become a key element in making a site work and earns a profit.
Submit Articles - 6 Red Hot Tips To Get Your Articles Read (6)
These types of titles reach out to a persons' emotions and makes them interested. 5) Keep them interested from the start to the finish. From your opening paragraph, use real life situations that can be adopted by the reader.
What You Need To Know About UK Mortgages As A First Time Buyer (7)
Unethical lenders may try to ensnare you with high interest rates and a loan that will have you paying for years. Many houses are priced out of the range affordable by first time buyers.
Articles - How To Create An Outline For All Of Your Articles (8)
While there are a great number of people who do not have the same attitude in article writing as others, there are still those who would rather walk in piping hot coals than do some article writing.
Submit Articles - 3 Things You Must Do Before You Submit To Article Directories (9)
Some are even using anchor texts which is also an effective method. But it is important to know that majority of the directories are not able to support this.
Practical Homeschooling Methods (10)
Community- Using outside groups and learning areas as teaching methods. By utilizing available resources and learning material, the tutor and student should work as a team for the latter to excel in education.
Newer Articles Highlighter:
Provide Informative Free Articles To Your Website Visitors And Reap The Rewards (1)
Give them a reason to keep coming back. Constantly added new information will do wonders for you and your customers. You want to avoid the "been there, done that, next" response on the part of your website visitors as well as the search engines.
The Essential Guide To Insurance (2)
In other words, contents can be defined as everything that you would normally take with you when you move. The lender will not insist that you take out a contents insurance policy however in many cases it is advisable.
How To Get The Best Results Out Of Your Bulb Planting Efforts (3)
Be sure to follow those directions so that your flowers are not adversely affected by too deep or too shallow of a bed. Be sure to fertilize and water thoroughly as soon as the planting is completed.
Free Web Site Traffic Methods (4)
You also must have the drive and perseverance to do hard work and research to generate more traffic for your site. How sweet it is to have more traffic for your site without spending a single cent.
Why Did People Love Dale? (5)
Keywords: NASCAR, NASCAR jerseys, NASCAR merchandise Have you ever noticed how many people are wearing No. 3 NASCAR jerseys these days? It's really quite a few. Dale Earnhardt has truly become a household name.
Help For Those With Acne Problems (6)
A skin specialist in New York is now using a combination of red light and blue light therapy to treat severe cases of acne successfully. Popping pimples can cause infection and scarring.
Infrastructure Decimated By Earthquake In Kobe, Japan On January 17, 1995 (7)
The social impact of this quake was devastating. The Japanese had considered themselves to be well prepared for such an event. It was thought that their buildings, mostly made of wood, were better able to withstand the shaking and shearing forces brought on by quakes because of the material's ability to flex, and bend.
Do You Have What It Takes? (8)
His popularity might partly be due to the fact that his father was so well loved but also because of his own personality and charm. He comes across as a nice guy in most every situation and has learned to work with the media instead of fighting them.
Retirement - Investing For Retirement (9)
Take care of your financial future by investing in it today. Pino Tedesco hosts a site on online stock trading and investing, supplying stock market articles that can be copied from his free web site content directory called www.stockfundsadvice.com.
How To Profit From Untapped Affiliate Markets (10)
Okay, let's now look beyond Clickbank, as there are many other untapped affiliate markets out there. Do a search for 'affiliate networks' and you will come across hundreds of different affiliate networks, each of which will often list plenty of companies and their respective products that you can promote as an affiliate.