When it comes to marketing your small business, you will want to maintain a high-quality website. A customer’s decision to remain loyal to your company will be influenced by whether your website is professional and easy to navigate. It is common for small businesses to hire professional web designers. If you choose another route, it is still important to know how you want the website to appear to customers. The following are several web design tips that will ensure a more successful website for your company.
Keep it Simple
If you have too much information displayed at a time, the customer may perceive your website as too technical or confusing. Likewise, if your website is designed so that many clicks are needed to find specific information, the customer may become lost or frustrated.
To keep things simple, you should adhere to a few principles. The first is readability. Do not write with a complex font. Although it may look nice, customers may have trouble reading the text. The second is keeping a relatively low amount of visuals on each page. This means that you should not have too many images or designs. If you must have a high amount of graphics, be sure to include text between the images. This will help search engines asses and index the relevancy of your website.
Be Straightforward
If your customer has a question and cannot find contact information anywhere, the quality of your website will suffer. One of the other good web design tips is to include your complete contact information on your homepage. If you prefer not to have this on your homepage, you can include the contact information at the bottom of every other page.
Additionally, you should be straightforward with your pricing, your selling process, and your selling policies. Do not wait until potential customers ask – get answers up ahead of time!
Keep it Easy to Navigate
To keep your website easy to navigate, create an archive of every page that exists on your website (be sure to keep it updated). This will allow customers to quickly access the page that they are looking for. Another one of the good web design tips is to implement a search function to provide customers with a quick method of finding what they need. Finally, you should keep up with the internet standards for these things. Do not set up a groundbreaking navigation system if customers will not know how to use it.
Include Useful Content
You will want your content to be up-to-date and informative for the customer. An example of this is to include recent photos (get them professionally done) of your product that you are selling. If your product is more interactive than the usual product, consider having a video made and hosting it on your website. This will give customers a much better idea of what they are getting involved with. On a related note, remove any outdated pages or old photos that are not accurate representations of your current products.
Finally, you can involve the customers in the experience by implementing interactive content such as comments, surveys, and reviews. If you choose to do this, you will need to spend time on creating and observing the customers’ interaction. It is better to disallow comments than to allow comments but never respond to them.