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Maximize Your Small Business Website: 12 Crucial Web Design Tips for Small Business Owners

Written by: Janis Pettit

Article Overview: 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.

Maximize Your Small Business Website: 12 Crucial Web Design Tips for Small Business Owners

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.

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Article Tags: abandonment, dark colors, elements, firefox, internet explorer, light background, navigation system, photos, pretty pictures, relationship, sales tool, search engines, small business owners, subscriber, text areas, traffic, virtual sales, visual interest, web designer



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