Business Website Design Top Tips
Effective business website design can appear deceptively easy on the outside, but can have a massive impact on the end of results. If designed and marketed badly, your website will lose you potential customers and will get little to no traffic. Here we discuss mistakes that must be avoided at all costs on your website.
1. Use of poor title tags. When a website is built, you must use appropriate title tags to describe the page. You should also include some of the target keywords that people might search for This also allows search engines to index and crawl the pages more easily.
2. Putting lots of ads on your webpage. Don’t do this as it will not only alienate your visitors, but also distract them, prompting them to leave the website. Keep ads and flashing banners to a minimum and your customers will focus on the important parts of the page.
3. Don’t use complicated website navigation. Most websites put the buttons on the right, left or top of the page. Main navigation pages such as the contact us, about us, faq, home page, etc. are normally best on either the left or top of the page. Don’t try and impress visitors with whizzing-out menus. Keep it simple and your customers will stay on your site longer.
4. Dead links on webpages. When a visitor clicks on a “dead link”, they get an error message and get very frustrated. Make sure all the links on your website work correctly – and that they point to the right place. Remember that having dead links on your pages can also get you penalised in the earch engines.
5. Don’t use Macromedia Flash on your pages unless impossible. Flash does have a place on websites, but is mainly found in gaming or interactive sites where this cannot be done a different way. Consider using animated GIF’s for moving images instead, as most people can view these in a web browser. Another consideration is you could try using javascript or java which is more supported that flash. Flash can take too long and by the time it has, your visitor has left your website.
6. Lack of a Search Box on your website. For a website with many pages, it is extremely important to allow users to search the site without having to find pages by going through every link.
7. Using PDF file links on the website. Using PDF files can good in the case of putting your glossy company brochure online, but it is better to ideally put the pages in HTML web format. More people will see the information then, as if site visitors don’t have Adobe Reader installed, they will have to install it. In our experience, people usually click away instead of trying to download it. Keep the use of PDF’s to a minimum.
8. Visited web links don’t change colour. Make sure links already clicked by your visitor on the website change colour and show as visited. People surfing the web get used to a link changing colour once they have already clicked it so keep it familiar to them.
9. Keep text formatting nice and ‘clean’. Make sure you structure the layout of text on your website neatly and clearly. Use pictures to break up the text and keep text in nicely formatted paragraphs to make the page easy to read.
10. Don’t use very small fonts. The use of small fonts can put a strain on the eyes of anyone, but more so people with impaired vision. Remember also that blind people now read web pages with screen readers. Make sure your website is W3C compliant so that the latest screen reading technology can ‘read’ them.
Learn more about business website design. Stop by Digital Flair where you can find out all about how to make your business web design bring your company leads and sales.
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