5 Factors of Web Design for Your Small Business Website
When starting to build your small business Website, all of the pieces that go into properly executing your business online can be quite overwhelming.
[source: Webs] From vision, to fonts, to imagery, we consulted our in-house Web design expert, Justin, to bring you the five factors to focus on when designing your small business Website:
1. Come with a goal in mind
It’s always a good idea to know what you want for your Website before you start designing.
Is the goal of your site to sell something, generate leads, show off your portfolio, or just display your business hours? Once you establish this goal, you can start crafting the content of the site around it. If you’re an artist showing your work, focus on your art and include nice imagery. If you’re advertising a store front, have your contact information and hours of operation front and center.
2. Get ideas from your competitors
Who else is in your industry? Do they already have a Website? We bet they do.
Research on your competitors and the effectiveness of their Websites can help you separate the Web designs that work from those that do not. Take notes and ensure your Website will be able to compete in the same space.
3. Keep structure with pages
Designing your Website to be short, sweet, and focused is beneficial to your business. A Website visitor will spend less than two-tenths of a second forming an impression of your brand, which means you have less than a second to convince your visitor to stay on your site to learn more about your brand.
Having an overwhelming amount of pages to click through will not help this impression. Decide how many pages you need to reach the goal you established, and don’t make up extra content to fill pages you don’t really need.
People’s short attention spans mean they want to reach your Webpage, get the information they want, and get it quickly.
4. Don’t get carried away with styling
Website styling comes with the rule of twos or threes.
No professional Website should have a pairing of more than two or three fonts or colors.
While many Website builders have a large library of fonts to choose from, it is essential to choose carefully. For example, headers are meant to break up buckets of information, but if you use a heavily scripted font for your header it makes it incredibly difficult for visitors to scan the page for a positive first impression.
For colors, a good rule of thumb is to try and complement the palette you have already chosen for your logo or brand mark on your site.
5. Use your budget in imagery
If Justin can make any one thing the most clear in this list, it would be to invest in imagery.
Only 28% of words on a Web page are actually read on an average visit, but adding color visuals increases the willingness to read by 80%!
So if you find an image that perfectly conveys what you do, it is more meaningful to have that image accompany your ‘About Us’ page than to have a site that is text-only.
Incorporating these five factors (goals, competitors, structure, styling, budget) in your Web design is vital as mobile traffic steadily increases. The more you have illegible fonts, too many colors, and substandard images, the less likely your small business Website will transfer nicely to mobile and boost your overall traffic.