Website Design Tips for Small Businesses

Why is website design important?

Website design is a very important aspect of successfully marketing your business. Your website is usually where you make the first impression on your customers and where they usually go to find out information about your business.

“ A website works best when it serves both the business and the visitor, ” said Adriane Galea, CEO and founder of The Beach Bum . “ For the business, it should have a clear call to action and help convert traffic into clients, leads, customers, etc. For the visitor, it should provide simple solutions to their problems or queries. ”

Here are six reasons why website design is important:

First Impressions

When customers land on your website, they make a judgment based on the look and design of your site within the first few seconds, so you should do everything you can to ensure that the first impression is a good one.

If your website is outdated, unorganized, or unattractive, customers will be turned off and take their business elsewhere.

Improve SEO

Your website design elements will determine how your website ranks on search engines like Google, thus affecting your efforts at search engine optimization (SEO). The design of your website affects how and where you publish content on your website, which in turn determines how search engines crawl and index your website. Additionally, your code should be SEO-friendly to help ensure that your pages appear in search results.

Setting the Tone for Customer Service

Just as customers will judge your business based on their first impression of your website, they will also judge the quality of your customer service. If you don't put careful thought and effort into designing your website, you probably won't go a long way in helping your customers. You want your website to be bright, modern, and welcoming, and to provide contact information.

Building Trust

The internet is full of scams, hacks, and misinformation, so a well-designed website is key to communicating that you are a legitimate and trustworthy business. A poorly designed or outdated website often appears untrustworthy or unsafe to customers, which can cost you business. This is especially important if you sell products or services on your website, as customers will need to enter payment information.

Helps you keep up with your competitors

If your competitors have beautifully designed websites and you don’t, you have an opportunity to steer your customers towards them because they will see your competitors as better, more trustworthy businesses.

Try to make a habit of browsing your competitors’ websites and see what they are doing instead of what you are doing on your own website. Pay attention to things that look good or work well and try to integrate them into your own website.

Build brand consistency

If you want to build brand awareness, it’s important to maintain consistent branding across as many channels as possible. Your website is the starting point for a lot of your business, and as such, it should set the tone for your brand. Make sure the fonts, colors, styles, and layouts are the same on every page of your site to ensure consistency and let visitors know where they are every time they click.

What makes a good business website?

There are many ways to build a quality website, and many aspects of quality design. Here are some key elements that should be included in your corporate website design:

Easy navigation

Most users come to your site with a goal in mind, such as looking up the price of an item or contacting your customer support, so you want to make it as quick and easy for them to accomplish their goal as possible. Having a confusing site where users need to click and conduct extensive searches leads to frustrated customers who are likely to leave your site for a competitor. Your navigation should be clear and self-explanatory, and include broad headings with related subtopics.

Responsive design

More people than ever before are accessing the web through smartphones and tablets, so having a responsive website that works well on any device is essential. A mobile-optimized website can create a positive viewing experience by doing things like creating page sizes, formatting menus, and incorporating drop-down menus. Search engines also consider a site’s mobile layout first when crawling your site, so if you want to appear higher in search engine results, you should make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

Consistent branding

As mentioned before, having consistent branding throughout your business and website creates a sense of cohesion and professionalism. Your website should have the same website layout, typography, and color scheme on every page so that users know where they are and where the information they need is on each page. Having a designated style guide also makes it quick and easy to add pages or elements to your website because you already have a template that determines how those pages will look on your website.

Imagery with a purpose

It's easy to go overboard when adding images and videos to your web pages; after all, images and videos are more engaging than text alone. However, you should avoid overwhelming your page with too many unnecessary images. Strive for a balance between text that serves a purpose and images that appeal; don't include images just for the sake of doing so.

Try placing an image or video after a block of text that explains or supports your text content. This way you can reiterate your point and engage your customers without overwhelming them with visuals.

Clear copy

The copy, or the words on the page, is an essential part of any website as these words convey all the necessary information to the customers. Make sure your copy is well-written and error-free and clearly communicates your message in an engaging manner. Your style guide should include guidelines on how to write copy to ensure consistency across the website and all brand materials.

“ Copy must be written in the perspective (mind) of the site visitor and in a language they understand, not a techie talking business, ” says Walt Wise , marketing strategist and business coach at BPI Strategy Group .

Call to Action

A call to action (CTA) directs customers to complete a specific action — for example, a button they click to subscribe to your newsletter. Your call to action button should be clear, eye-catching, and consistent with your brand.

Fast page speed

Page speed is how quickly your website pages load when a customer clicks on them. It’s a big part of how customers interact with your site and influences Google’s ranking of your site. If one page of your site takes too long to load, customers will get impatient and look for information on another, faster site. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how quickly your site loads and identify where you can improve your page speed.

Business Website Design Tips

Whether you’re looking to improve your website’s design or start building one, here are eight tips for creating a strong website design:

1. Create a plan.

When creating or redesigning a website, the first step should be to create a detailed plan of what you want to do, how you want to do it, and how each element of the website will serve the customer. Map out the customer journey from beginning to end to fully understand what your website needs to offer and how each step should be designed. For this step, you should have data on who your customers are, what they like, what types of content they respond well to, and how to convert them from website visitors to customers.

2. Remove unnecessary elements.

Modern website design is all about clarity, clarity, and efficiency, so eliminate anything clunky and unnecessary on your site. This includes animations, excessive text copy, superfluous images, and excessive amounts of useless jargon and promotional language (like " next generation , " " robust , " " innovative " ).

Customers these days have short attention spans and don’t want to wade through pages of fluff content to find what they’re looking for, so design your site to be fast and to the point.

3. Include social platform buttons.

Your online presence should be a cohesive unit, with your website being the centerpiece. So it helps to have buttons linking to your social platforms ( Facebook , Twitter , LinkedIn , Instagram ) somewhere on your site — ideally in the footer that travels with customers as they click through.

4. Make the home page scrollable.

Since more people than ever are accessing websites through tablets and mobile devices, having a scrollable homepage means your site is accessible to more users. Plus, scrollable homepages are modern and engaging because you can animate elements of your site to pop up or move as users scroll down. This type of design adds an element of interest without being too overwhelming or distracting. Be sure to divide your scrollable homepage into sections to make it easy to navigate. Your homepage should include the following sections:

• Introduction / About Us

• Service Overview

• Product / Product Features

• Case Studies / Success Stories

• Resources

• Contact Us

5. Don’t be afraid of white space.

Whitespace is no longer something to be avoided. Consider using whitespace (or any color of whitespace) to help break up your page and make your content easier to read by prioritizing the most important text. Whitespace can also help you determine where to place other page elements.

6. Optimize for mobile devices.

According to Google , 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site if they can’t access it, and 40% will visit a competitor’s site instead. Therefore, you should prioritize making sure your site is mobile responsive and looks just as good on smaller screens. Make sure you tailor your mobile site to respond directly to the needs of your site visitors. Think about why they’re visiting your mobile site and what information they might be looking for, and make it as easy for them to get that information as possible.

7. Develop an SEO strategy.

SEO is an essential part of any business's online presence and should be considered at every step in creating or redesigning your website . Think about what content is relevant and interesting to your customers and design an SEO strategy based on your content .

8. Ensure safety.

Customers are becoming increasingly protective of their personal information, so you should do everything you can to reassure them that their information is safe on your website. This means having a current SSL certificate, which is a small data file that binds encryption keys to your business and protects credit card transactions, data transfers, logins, and browsing. A current SSL certificate is important because it’s what creates the “https” application protocol and padlock symbol in a user’s search bar. If your website doesn’t have the “https” application protocol, Google will often flag your site as unsafe and steer customers away.