Six Crucial Components of Great Web Design for Small Businesses

Ask someone what it takes to make sure your small business has a great web design and you are sure to get as many different opinions as people you ask. Some people like flashy, artsy sites that are visually alluring, while others believe a site should be businesslike and to the point.

While there are many different ways to design the look and feel of a website – and you should ultimately get the one that appeals to you personally – you should always make sure that your website is built with the fundamental components for success. The following is our list of the fundamentals of great web design that all sites should be concerned with:

Relevant content – Of the list of fundamentals that we’ll be providing you with today, relevant content is by far and away the most important. Why? Simply put, visitors to your site want to find what they came for. This is simple and obvious enough, but most sites are very infrequently updated, so their content is often stale or no longer representative of the current reality of the business or organization it is representing.One very important visitor that your content needs to impress is the search engine. Search engines crawl (spider, scan, etc.) the text on your site to determine if your content is relevant for their users. If your content is not relevant to what they are looking for, your site will fall in the search rankings and you’ll get less traffic.
A clear purpose for each page – Each page on your site should be treated as an individual, with its own clear purpose and content that suits that purpose. You should be able to capture that purpose in a one-line sentence, and everything you design into the page should be about allowing that page to fulfill its purpose – nothing more. Very often you will find that you have pages on your site that are trying to accomplish more than one purpose; split them up and you will add great clarity for your visitors.
Effective use of keywords – Keywords are the words or phrases that searchers are most likely to identify as relevant to your business, products, content or anything else that you are trying to draw attention to. The use of the right keywords helps the search engines to deliver the right sites to their searchers, and delivers you the most appropriate visitors to your website. Optimizing each page of your site around a specific keyword increases the chances that the right searcher is going to find your site.As an example, a site like Everon could choose to optimize around the words “computer support” to attract visitors to our site. However, we’ve found out through years of trial-and-error that people who search for that keyword phrase are typically smaller customers that can’t afford and don’t value our services. It turns out that optimizing around language such as “IT management” provides a much better quality of visitor to our site – one that is most likely to be a good Everon customer. As you can see, slight adjustments in getting your keywords right can make a big difference.
Good page titles – When constructing a website, each page of the site is given a page title. This title should be unique from the other pages on the site, and it should accurately reflect the purpose of the page. This is critical because the page title often shows up in search engine results, and gave give a potential visitor the last bit of information they need to determine if your site is the one they are looking for.
A site map – A site map is a tool to communicate the structure and flow of your site, primarily to the search engines. Search engines “feed” off of the text on your site, and use links as the roadmap to find the text they are looking for. A good site map is like a good atlas for the search engines, illustrating the various links on your site and what they point to.
Clear “conversion” path/instructions – Presumably you are looking for visitors to your site to do something: purchase a product, sign up for a newsletter, ask to be contacted by a salesperson, etc. These actions are commonly referred to as “conversions”.Following the same logic of having a clear purpose for each page, you should also have a clear conversion strategy for your site, and make it as clear and easy as possible for your visitors to take the conversion action you are looking for. This is a study in and of itself, but there are a few fundamentals worth mentioning:
- Ideally only have one conversion goal for your site. If you must have more than one, make sure each has a separate, clear path for the visitor to follow.
- Give your visitors the option to convert everywhere it makes sense to do so, not just on a single page in the site. For example, if you are looking for visitors to register for a newsletter, include a “Sign up now” link on every page.
- Make it as easy as possible to take the desired action: remove all unnecessary steps, ask only for critical information, and give clear instructions.

Good professional sports coaches make their athletes – often already the best in the world at what they do – practice the fundamentals of their sport daily because they know it will make everything else they do better. The same can be said for the fundamental website components above: make sure you are practicing them, and all of your other marketing activities will perform better.

MRC

Google shares plans for becoming an ISP

Should small businesses upgrade to Windows 7?

Square 2.2 Sweetens The Deal with Added Features

Small Business Tech Tips

Brought to You by the Folks at Everonit.com