If you run a small business, you know that website design is important to everything from branding your company to making sales. First impressions matter and your website is your company’s main chance to make a great one. Fortunately, designing a great website is not quite as tough as it sounds. Follow these easy design tips to ensure that your company offers a website customers won’t forget.
1) Simplify
When it comes to websites, user experience is incredibly important. Users will quickly become overwhelmed and disinterested if your site is overly complex or crowded. That said, do everything you can to keep the site simple and to-the-point. This is especially important for small businesses due to the fact that most of the customers who visit the site are likely to be new leads exploring the company for the first time.
That said, small businesses can’t afford to risk driving new customers away by asking them to sift through a clunky site with too many widgets, lists, options and links. When designing a website, small businesses need to keep in mind that the main goal is to provide a positive interaction for visitors. By ensuring that your site is easy to navigate and appealing to look at, you stand the best possible chance of attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.
2) Use Categories to Organize Information
Great websites load quickly and one of the best ways to drive away traffic is to bore your customers with slow load times. Over-stuffed pages with seemingly endless scroll bars are difficult to navigate and may not load well on all devices. That said, use category pages and tabs to break up your content instead of shoving all of your products and information onto one never-ending page.
“Products,” “Services,” and “About Us” tabs and category pages are a great way to organize information and help your customers find exactly what they’re looking for. Keep in mind that while a site’s homepage should always feature your most important promotional events, special offers and new inventory announcements, it should be clean and uncluttered and should act as a portal to navigate to the site’s other categories.
3) Sync to Social Media
If you use a social media platform like Twitter or Facebook to promote your company, install a live feed feature on your website to display your most recent social media posts. This will allow customers visiting your site to discover your social media channels and interact more deeply with your company. The one caution is this: don’t install a social media widget if you don’t update your feeds regularly. An outdated or stagnant Twitter feed, for example, will just make your site look stagnant.
4) Keep Your Homepage On-Brand
If your products and all of your related marketing materials are all a mix of black and red, you don’t want your site’s homepage to be airy and white. Successful marketing is all about consistency. In order to keep your homepage consistent, consider your company’s color scheme, template and logo and then seek to incorporate those elements into your site design. Keep in mind that it’s important to remain consistent across all of your advertising platforms to ensure your audience is able to recognize your brand anywhere it may pop up. This means utilizing the same color scheme, fonts, taglines and product photos across all of your various distribution channels.
5) Add a Featured Image to Your Homepage
When your customers go to share your company page on Facebook or Google+, they’ll quickly become frustrated if they realize that there is no thumbnail image to attach alongside it. Visual content has a high conversion rate and adding a featured image to your homepage will earn your site more views, click-throughs and shares. Keep in mind that the image should not be complex or intricate. A simple image that compresses well into a thumbnail format and is related to your company’s mission or products is completely adequate for sharing purposes.
Website design is a pivotal piece of a company’s success. In addition to drawing customers to your content, a great website design is one of the most effective marketing and tools in existence today. With that in mind, utilize these 5 simple tips to ensure that your website is among the most beautiful, valuable and easy to use on the web today.
To learn more about how to effectively and successfully market your small business, visit Bigfoot Media today.
