LayoutsPack, a premium provider of high quality web templates, continues providing you with useful pieces of advice to help achieve successful results in every aspect of your business. So today we will touch a topic of small business websites creation and dwell on its key features.
Building your small business website is a very responsible task as it will predefine the customers’ attitude towards you and your activity. If you present your business by incomprehensible and disorganized web presence it may scare away your clients with no wish for return. Not an encouraging perspective, eh?
So let’s identify the main mistakes you should avoid when creating a small business website.
1. Huge text blocks on main pages. People are not interested in reading pages of text, often they just scan your website for usable content. So think over the main pages text thoroughly and give your potential customers sufficient but laconic information about your business underlining only its main features.
2. Leaving your clients without explanation of their next steps. After you have told about your business let the users know what to do if they are going to continue collaboration. After the viewer has familiarized with your website he needs to know what to do next to make use of the services you offer.
3. A lot of sections. If you really want to make your website simple to navigate don’t put a lot of links within it, otherwise the viewers will be totally confused. Think thoroughly over each section of your web presence and remember that the less pages your website has the more friendly it will appear to the customers (if provided with sufficient information, of course).
4. Flash surplus. A website that includes flash elements in general looks rather attractive. But too much flash never adds to your small business website’s reputation. Be careful not to overfill your source with flash technologies or it may annoy your potential customers and make them forget about the main purpose of their visit. Moreover, you can’t be sure that all the flash applications will always run properly.
5. Half-done pages. Always think thoroughly over each page’s content. If you want your small business website to be competitive and worthy you should make it complete in every aspect.
Except the mistakes don’t forget to take into account such elements that your small business website should have in order to be called good one. Pay attention to business news section as it demonstrates credibility and attracts links. Think about your SEO goals and innovative SEM campaign until it’s too late. And remember that your small business website’s design should be closely related to the content and combine with it harmoniously.
Meanwhile, browse our collection of Business Web Templates to find the most brilliant website designs for your or your customers future online presence.
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Hi,useful tips! Here are some of my own…
Designing the Homepage - this is the most important page with the website as most uses will land on it, relative to other internal pages of your website. Users should be up to navigate to your most important pages. Use bullet points to summarise your entire value proposition to convince the user to stay onsite. Users attention Span is extremely short when visiting websites. Expectations are high and users are not forgiving for slow loading pages, difficult to navigate or confusing on the eye. Make sure your homepage can load within 3 seconds… don’t use too many images or technologies that are potentially incompatible with some users PCs (not everyone has got what Flash has got installed for instance). Navigation – the most important aspect of usability is a clean and simple navigational structure. Your structure must be consistent across all pages so users have a clear understanding of how to find their way between sections and back again. A horizontal menu system at the top of the page (similar to the way in which this website is laid out) is a widely used an easy to understand method of navigation. A vertical menu is useful as a sub menu from the main menu. Make sure that your main menu includes a button or link to your homepage, contact us and sitemap. To supplement your main menu you may also use a ‘breadcrumb’ drill > down > summary is also useful to highlight the page the user has entered. Use of colours to highlight the menu item the user has landed on is a simple way of to help the use understand where they are.Graphic Design - perhaps the hardiest and most emotive area of web design is graphic design. It consumes of beginners time and invariably is best left to the professional graphic designer. Think back to your marketing objectives.. Is your new web site going to be paid brochure only website, shopping basket, forum or portal? Ignore your own personal preferences of regards to the colour and style.. The only thing that matters is the expectations of your potential buyers. Have they dealt with your company before? Do you have an existing brand, logo, slogan and colour scheme which your site must adhere to? If in doubt just keep things simple. Used lots of white space, neutral colours such as dark blues and dark greens and business like fonts such as Tahoma or Verdana. A quick and easy solution is to purchase a website template and there are literally thousands to buy online. Be aware that one in twelve people are colour blind who find it difficult to distinguish between red and green.Sitemaps – a site map is the page to help at your users your list of every single page on site. In should be a hierarchical and ideally link based. Other versions of sitemaps that are of less importance to users but of critical importance to search engines are sitemap.xml, robots.txt and urllist.txt. These files are one of the first files search bots look before in order to cash and copy new or updated web pages. Javascript – try and keep your site easy to load an navigate around. The use of some scripts and the DHTML sometimes throws up security and compatibility issues are between browsers. Search – but a search box on every page to allow a free text query by user that can retrieve any page on the site. This is more appropriate for very large sites. Major search engines provide a quick and easy solution of joining search to your site.Page Structure – try and suspect the areas of your page up but into a top border, side border, bottom border and main body. Try and summarise each page with bullet points near the top and the left of the body area. Have you need to try and entice users to browse the rest of the page of after the first few seconds by skimming the bullets.Screen Resolution Issues - different users still use a but screen resolutions depending upon they’re operating system default setting, preferred setting, browser type and whether or not they have poor eyesight. Able to create a website design that caters for all screen resolutions by specifying everything inside the table set to 100%. This means for larger screen resolutions your website will automatically reduce and be squeezed together. Bear this in mind when choosing font sizes, and creating of the top navigational menu (if you limit the menu width to 800 pixels you will cater for users width the largest 800 x 600 resolution). Internal links – from a usability perspective, always use absolute URL’s as opposed to relative URLs. This will ensure simpler page updating when creating files that are not in the root directory.Images and video – question the use of every image to convey the message Of each page. Images slowdown what page loading time. Always optimize each image before you upload it to make sure it condenses to the right width and height and is designed for web browsing. Always add an ALT text (this is an HTML script that allows alternative text when non-textual elements such as images). Typically used to show a short description of an image when hovering the curser over it.to the images source to help searchbots understand what the image is showing.Frames – avoid losing frames whenever possible because there are difficult to navigate, difficult to design, stop searchbots from caching (a search engine crawls and ranks URLs using algorithms and places them in a database hierarchically), important pages and confusing for users trying to bookmark a particular page .
I believe that in order to have a good web design, designers should be keep abreast to the changes in mentality, skills and sophistication of today web visitors. Fifteen years ago if you had a website with excellent graphics, flashy banners, and some animation elements you had a great website. Today you need to have content: relevant, unique, useful, you really have to solve some problems for your visitors.If you are interested on making striking web designs with just a simple clicks, visit us at sitegrinder for photoshop and be able to get the stunning web design that you always wanted.