10 Effective Tips to Great Web Design

/in /by

If you are starting your own online business, then your web design needs to attract and hold the attention of potential customers. It takes more than fancy graphics or dazzling displays to build your customer base.

The secret to success when it comes to effective web design lies mostly in providing what customers want in terms of easy access, intuitive navigation and interesting content. Naturally, you will have to select a niche area where your website can be seen as an “authority”, but that is backed by having the right support to ensure that visitors become customers.

What follows are 10 effective tips in creating the best web design for your business. Each of these tips is fairly straightforward, but together they make a great combination that will help pull in visitors and create customers.

1.) Keep Things Simple

The old saying “Keep it simple, stupid” is just as relevant for effective web design. You don’t want to overwhelm visitors with a myriad of colors, menu choices and glaring advertisements. A simpler, more straightforward website is actually appreciated by visitors because they are more interested in the information, products and services that you provide rather than how “pretty” your website appears

2.) Choose the Best Color Scheme

People associate certain colors with particular subjects. White and blue for example are often associated with medically-oriented information while bright reds, pinks and other “loud” colors are associated with punk rock bands. Whatever products or subject matter you are presenting on your website, it needs to be presented in an appropriate color scheme. This brings in the right atmosphere for your online business and helps to keep visitors coming back. Do a little research on your competitors to see what they offer.

3.) Highlight Menu Bar

This is one of those really simple steps that so many people overlook. By highlighting your menu bar in a color separate from the rest of the color scheme of the website, you make navigation that much simpler. Good, intuitive navigation is one of the key elements of all successful online businesses. The easier you make it for customers to find what they want, the more they will buy from you.

4.) Speed Up Load Time

Your web pages should load onto basically any computer, laptop or mobile device in less than 2 seconds, tops. Slow load times easily discourage visitors who will abandon your website and go somewhere else. So be sure to test your webpages on slower internet speeds and mobile devices just to be sure. By compressing css files, coding your pages to optimal speeds and using Google to host javascript files, you can speed up your web design considerably.

5.) Create the Proper Structure

Good structure is what you find in newspapers, magazines and periodicals where the reader is easily taken from one source of information to another. Your website needs to be logically structured so that visitors can quickly find the information that they seek. The structure of your website should be straightforward, such as the menu bar near the top, the latest news or information displayed in a headline, pertinent older information such as blog reports, coupons, discount and such lined up on one side and so forth. The more logical you structure your website the easier it is to captivate your visitor.

6.) Simplified Lead Collection

Getting the name and email address of visitors is standard procedure in obtaining leads, but you should not do anymore than that in terms of getting information. This is because for customers, spending time handing over information about them is an uncomfortable process. The longer it lasts, the less likely they are to participate. So just keep it to email addresses and names for your newsletters and other lead generating campaigns.

7.) Proper Font Size

This is one of the more interesting aspects of proper web design, the size of the fonts that you use. Not too large and not too small may seem somewhat generalized, but you should use only a single font for your content and then use different fonts for titles of pages and such for highlighting purposes. Plus, the fonts you choose should not be garish, tiny or unreadable.

8.) Enhance the Checkout Process

Many sales are lost when customers get confused about how to pay for an item, so all that work in getting them to your website is for naught because of a single hiccup in the purchasing process. Your website checkout center should be simple and inviting, making it easy to purchase the products that you have. Be sure to test this process to ensure that it is working smoothly.

9.) Regular Content Updates

Too many online businesses focus on getting people to their website in the first place, but do not offer a reason for them to come back. Since repeat customers are the main source of income for most businesses, your website design should incorporate that fact through regular content updates. This means regularly updating your content, adding new information, launching new marketing campaigns and so forth to keep people coming back.

10.) Use Plenty of Calls to Action

Perhaps your customers are not buying because you haven’t asked them. Calls to action are an important part of effective web design. You don’t have to overdo it, but effective calls to action helps convinced many customers to go ahead and make that purchase. If you use splash pages in particular, then calls to action are a must. However, good web design incorporates effective calls to action when needed, such as when offering new discounts or promoting new products.

These are just 10 ways your business web design can improve dramatically by incorporating simple, basic themes into the content. All of these tips will help your web design achieve the goal of greater visitor conversion to customers who come back to your website on a repeated basis. The better you tailor your web design to pull in and keep repeating customers, the more profits you will earn by selling more products and services. Effective online business web design means better customer service and higher sales as well.

Content & Design: The Yin and Yang of Great Websites

/in /by

People around the world view millions of websites daily. Unfortunately, they don’t stay on them very long. What makes them click to another site? Is it the design? The copy? Or, as this article contends, both. To keep a reader engaged, both the copy and the design must be equally compelling or you may very well lose that viewer.

I’ve stressed this many times before, but let me do it one more time for the cheap seats: Hard as this may be to believe, your website may be announcing the cure for cancer but if the site is unappealing or difficult to read, your message will be lost on most visitors. By the same token, if the content isn’t clear and easy to understand even the most visually inspiring page won’t hold the visitor’s attention and your all-important message will be lost on most readers.

While it’s true that web designers control both the look and the functionality of the site, many often make the mistake of not putting enough emphasis on the importance of engaging content. Most designers focus on the user experience which is, of course, all well and good, however, not recognizing that good content is equally as important as good design is a common and fundamental error made in most websites.

Web designers need to take a lesson from advertising art directors who spend much of their time working on print ads or other print collateral pieces such as brochures et al. They generally design for a headline, not just around it. They ensure that the headline is crafted and placed on the page so it stresses the message with the emphasis that was intended. The same should be true for all Web content, headlines and body copy. Creating pages of dummy copy and then having the copywriter fill in the blanks is a foolish mistake in either medium. The practice of using the design of the content to help best communicate the message is known as communication design. While this cross-discipline approach is quickly gaining in popularity, the reality still remains that no matter how well laid out a page is, the most powerful tool available for effectively dispensing information to our audiences is well-written, compelling content.

One of the most valuable tools for creating relevant, compelling content is editing. And not the kind of edits the average reader will point out, but the kind only professional, experienced copywriters and journalists can bring to the party. Trained for many years not only to spot spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors, this rarefied group not only knows how to keep your content on track to its intended message but can make your copy easier to read and scan; an important benefit in an arena in which readers grant your content just seconds before moving on to another site.

Of the most common pieces of advice given to any writer–advertising, journalist or novelist–is this one: write what you know. While almost every content writer has heard this sound piece of wisdom, few practice it. They make the mistake of not researching and understanding the product, service or client about which they are charged to write. Often, new Web content is a rehashed version of a client’s old Web content. And while the new version may be more elegant or even more engaging, it will be little or no more effective in communicating what it is that makes this client’s offering special since the writer hasn’t taken to time to learn it himself.

As with most creative efforts, most of us learn to be good at it by first being bad and making lots of mistakes. What counts in each of those efforts is that the writer and the designer alike both use their imaginations; the stuff they’re both supposed to be chock full of. I’m not suggesting that designers be able to write content or that copywriters become expert designers, though a little knowledge of the opposite camp doesn’t hurt. What I am proposing is that copywriters and Web designers need to work together more closely than ever to produce websites that both attract and engage viewers better than ever.

Intro to SEO for Business Owners

/in /by

Search engine optimization now represents one of the crucial aspects of building any online business.  Achieving high ranking on Google’s organic search results can mean the difference between attracting customers and drowning in oblivion.  Adopting several key strategies will greatly enhance your chances of doing well against the competition.

For the last several years, SEO has come to be synonymous with business survival on the web.  Unfortunately, whenever there is a starving crowd, unscrupulous operators are bound to enter the fray. Given this state of affairs, business owners should gain a solid, basic understanding of the principles of SEO in order to protect themselves from getting ripped off.

The first step in understanding optimization for the web is to gain a sense of how your site is performing relative to the competition. Running a check of your site on search engine results pages will give you a quick snapshot of your site’s ranking and will help to shed some light on who may be visiting your site and if they are a targeted user that will convert or stay long on your site.

Second, many business owners fail to understand that SEO, at its core, seeks to align the content of your site with the mind of your target market.  The greatest mistake a business owner can make is to simply produce content without regard to how it will appear on search engines.  For example, many people believe that thinking up a snappy name for a website will automatically bring in traffic.  However, this is often a tragic mistake.  The reason is that unless sufficient numbers of people are typing in your site’s name, or the words that make up your site name, it will never come up on the search engine results.

To expand on this concept, think of the average user sitting at the keyboard typing in a search into Google.  Let’s say you own a website on car repair.  You have to think in terms of what the average person looking for information on car repair will type into Google – and then develop relevant, reliable and authoritative content for your site to match the user’s search.

This, in essence is search engine optimization.  There are tools that help you search and identify certain keywords or keyword phrases, together with the relative supply and demand.  To optimize your site you need to create pages with content revolving around these keywords.

A word of caution, over populating your page with too many keywords in will earn you a penalty from the search engines. This is also known as keyword spamming and is frowned upon in the search engine industry. Generally, key words should make up no more than two percent or three percent of the total copy on a page.

Third, update your content frequently. The search engines crave new, relevant material.  Trying to produce too much at one time will likely lead to burn out. Rather, adopting a steady schedule of content production over time will eventually help your site gain more visitors.  In addition to updating, produce articles of information and post them on other sites such as personal or professional blogs, article directories, news sites, and other outlets that allow you to create a link back to your site.  Here, too, there are certain rules to obey. The sites should be related to your website. Don’t fall for so-called black hat operators who promise you the moon (at a premium price). Instead, take the high road and become a purveyor of good information.  Ultimately, good business principles are the same whether you are online or offline.

We’re on Thumbtack – check us out!

/in /by

We recently created a professional profile on Thumbtack. Check out our new profile and learn more about the people, passion and places that power Columbus Website Design. Thumbtack is a new way to hire local services.

Web Design Columbus

by Web Design Columbus