Maximize Your Small Business Website: 12 Crucial Web Design Tips for Small Business Owners
Maximize Your Small Business Website: 12 Crucial Web Design Tips for Small Business Owners
Your site can look great, but not contain the elements that will make it a profit generating virtual sales tool for your business.
Before we get into that though, here are the things you need to think about when designing or re-designing your website that will make it user friendly
1. The design of your website should be clean and simple.
2. The colors should reflect your company’s branding. Stay away from dark colors in the main text areas as it makes reading your content difficult. Stick with a white or light background and dark text color.
3. Make sure your font is large enough to be read in different browsers. Test it in different versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox
4. Don’t use special intro pages—they just mean an extra click and time wasted for your visitors. They have been proven to dramatically increase visitor abandonment.
5. Do use a simple, easy to understand navigation system where visitors can get the information they came for quickly and easily. If they can’t find what they’re searching for in 30 seconds, they’re likely to abandon the search.
6. Include some photos and graphics for visual interest, but remember people are searching for information, not pretty pictures.
7. Plan on eventually building out to a minimum of 20 to 30 pages if you want to gain the interest of the search engines.
8. Include a data capture form where you ask people to give you their contact information in return for something of value so that you get them onto your subscriber list.
9. Include either a brief audio or video. This is your opportunity to “meet” your visitor virtually and begin building a relationship with them. You can upload video to You Tube and place the link on your webpage.
10. Map out your website before you build it for strategic advantage, ease of navigation and usability. Make a chart, kind of like a family tree, showing how each page links to other pages. You can do this with many web design programs where you can see the internal linking and navigation charts that are created by the program. But if someone else is designing, just do it on paper so you have an overall website strategy.
11. Have a blog created on your website. Your web designer can do this easily using Wordpress. Google loves blogs because the content is regularly updated.
12. Have your website designed using a Content Management System. If you are a small or solo business with a limited budget, this will allow you to make simple changed to your website yourself in a program that is extremely easy to use. Otherwise you’ll pay each time you need to add anything to your site.
Getting your website built right the first time will save you tons of money and will set you up to generate leads and profit online.
Maximize Your Small Business Website 12 Crucial Web Design Tips for Small Business Owners - To learn more about this author, visit Janis Pettit's Website.
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If you’re like many of the small business owners we work with, you may have spent a bundle paying your web designer for your website, only to find that it’s not generating much traffic. Or if it is, those visitors are bouncing right off your site. I call this a “rubber” site, when what you really want is a “sticky” site where people hang around and take action.
Your site can look great, but not contain the elements that will make it a profit generating virtual sales tool for your business.
Before we get into that though, here are the things you need to think about when designing or re-designing your website that will make it user friendly
1. The design of your website should be clean and simple.
2. The colors should reflect your company’s branding. Stay away from dark colors in the main text areas as it makes reading your content difficult. Stick with a white or light background and dark text color.
3. Make sure your font is large enough to be read in different browsers. Test it in different versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox
4. Don’t use special intro pages—they just mean an extra click and time wasted for your visitors. They have been proven to dramatically increase visitor abandonment.
5. Do use a simple, easy to understand navigation system where visitors can get the information they came for quickly and easily. If they can’t find what they’re searching for in 30 seconds, they’re likely to abandon the search.
6. Include some photos and graphics for visual interest, but remember people are searching for information, not pretty pictures.
7. Plan on eventually building out to a minimum of 20 to 30 pages if you want to gain the interest of the search engines.
8. Include a data capture form where you ask people to give you their contact information in return for something of value so that you get them onto your subscriber list.
9. Include either a brief audio or video. This is your opportunity to “meet” your visitor virtually and begin building a relationship with them. You can upload video to You Tube and place the link on your webpage.
10. Map out your website before you build it for strategic advantage, ease of navigation and usability. Make a chart, kind of like a family tree, showing how each page links to other pages. You can do this with many web design programs where you can see the internal linking and navigation charts that are created by the program. But if someone else is designing, just do it on paper so you have an overall website strategy.
11. Have a blog created on your website. Your web designer can do this easily using Wordpress. Google loves blogs because the content is regularly updated.
12. Have your website designed using a Content Management System. If you are a small or solo business with a limited budget, this will allow you to make simple changed to your website yourself in a program that is extremely easy to use. Otherwise you’ll pay each time you need to add anything to your site.
Getting your website built right the first time will save you tons of money and will set you up to generate leads and profit online.
Maximize Your Small Business Website 12 Crucial Web Design Tips for Small Business Owners - To learn more about this author, visit Janis Pettit's Website.
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Jeff FosterWebBizIdeas.com is a Minneapolis website design company founded to help people start an internet business by providing them with website, business, and internet resources that help foster the growth of successful online businesses and develop innovative Internet business ideas. We specialize in internet consulting & internet marketing. - Visit Jeff Foster's Website |
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Cheryl MatthynssensCheryl is a life skills coach, licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor and a 20 year entrepreneur. Cheryl's dedication to achieving a life of balance led to her expanding her teaching from the simple managing of life's daily challenges to adding financial well being as well. A direct marketer with DrinkACT, she is gaining ground in the online community with her concepts of making sure business owners, entreprenuers and employees have well rounded life styles. She opened up a small affiliate site - The Balance Guide- to help others find resources for mental and emotional well being. Visit Cheryl's blog to see more of the diversity beyond business she has began offering online at www.thebalanceguide.blogspot.com - Visit Cheryl Matthynssens's Website |
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John AlexanderJohn has taught keyword research and SEO skills to small groups of business owners and Webmasters from over 80 different countries world wide since 2002. John is also the Director of Search Engine Academy ; Co-director of Training at Search Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first comprehensive online search engine marketing courses at SEO Training Online and the SEO Workshop Resource Center. I look forward to hearing from you! - Visit John Alexander's Website |
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Anne BarrAnne Barr has over 26 years experience in sales and marketing, six years as a franchisee. She has assisted over 367 business owners and purchasers to achieve their goals in career change, transition and exit strategy. She holds the designation of Certified Franchise Executive from the International Franchise Association, Certified Business Intermediary from the International Business Brokers Association and Board Certified Broker from the Texas Association of Business Brokers. Anne is active in professional organizations, networking groups and volunteers for non-profit entities. As owner/operator of four successful businesses, Anne has proven people skills and enjoys helping clients find the right "fit" in business ownership. Visit www.FranchiseOpportunitySpecialist.com for more information about me and my company. - Visit Anne Barr's Website |
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Kim CastleWith nearly two decades in the advertising and design business, with clients like Domino's Pizza, General Motors, Direct TV, Pedigree, Wolfgang Puck, Higher Octave Music, Hollywood Celebrity Products, Disney, and Paramount, as well as thousands of entrepreneurs around the world define, structure, communicate, and position their business for greater profits, BrandU(R) co-creators Kim Castle and W. Vito Montone discovered that entrepreneurs could experience the same power that big brands command for a fraction of the cost with the world's only process-based results-drive Integral approach to business creation. BrandU(R) is helping entrepreneurs grow with the power of extreme clarity from idea...to brand...to market(TM) and helping one million entrepreneurs become successful and whole so that they can make a difference in the world. Are you one of them? If you want to experience clarity all the way to the bank(TM), get started now at http://www.brandu.com. - Visit Kim Castle's Website |
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George LudwigGeorge Ludwig is a recognized authority on sales strategy and peak performance psychology. An international speaker, trainer, and corporate consultant, he helps clients like Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, Northwestern Mutual, CIGNA, and numerous others improve sales force effectiveness and performance. Though it's George's strategies and processes that help corporations increase productivity and performance, it's his tremendous energy and dynamism that spark the transformation. Again and again, clients remark on his amazing ability to unleash human capacity and inspire men and women to break out of their comfort zones. The result is a whole new type of salesperson. His customized presentations teach achievers to make stunning advances in their lives. From helping salespeople realize cherished dreams to helping corporations exponentially accelerate revenue streams, George Ludwig leaves audiences and individuals empowered, emboldened, and clamoring for more. George is the best-selling author of Power Selling: Seven Strategies for Cracking the Sales Code and Wise Moves: 60 Quick Tips to Improve Your Position in Life & Business. - Visit George Ludwig's Website |
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Stephanie RobeyStephanie Robey is President and CoFounder of Pivot Positive, LLC - an Internet marketing business focused on helping people start work at home ventures. Previously, she was employed at The Search Agency with over 20 years experience in graphic design and 10 years experience in online marketing. She was responsible for launching the Conversion Path Optimization (CPO) unit where she and her team have conducted hundreds of optimization tests for online companies across multiple verticals. She is a successful entrepreneur having started and sold 2 companies and remains on the board of directors of the third, PhotoSpin.com Stephanie began her career in the direct marketing realm creating and producing direct mail for many of the major cable television companies and directly attributes her understanding of Internet marketing to those early offline experiences. Stephanie is a graduate of San Diego State University with a BFA in Graphic Arts and also holds an Executive MBA from the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University. Read Steph's Blog Meet Steph and Dave Sign up for our Free 7-Day BootCamp: Self Employed & Rich - Visit Stephanie Robey's Website |
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