Your website acts as an online storefront for your business. A well designed website builds trust, displays your professionalism and acts as a powerful digital marketing tool. A poorly designed site turns people away and drives them to the competition. You can optimize your current small-business website design with these 10 tips.
- Optimize mobile users. With more than 50% of traffic coming from mobile devices these days, make sure your website is accessible across all platforms. Mobile users face errors, hard-to-use navigation and data-draining auto-play videos. Give these visitors a convenient, mobile-optimized environment.
- Add clear typography. Proper font selection improves content readability and adds to the overall appearance of your website. Limit the number of fonts so you don't use dozens of different options on every page. Maintain consistency with font sizes and styles, such as making all your H1 tags the same height.
- Create user-friendly navigation. Users shouldn't get lost searching through your site or need to click endlessly to find the right section. Change your navigation structure to streamline the steps required to access essential information. You may need to reorganize your content to match your new navigation menu.
- Put the most important content front and center. What do your customers need to know immediately? Get them these details as quickly as possible to capture their attention before they leave your site. For example, if you have a retail storefront, your visitors need your location, your hours and some information about your product categories.
- Maintain brand consistency. The colors, fonts and other design elements should match your other sales and marketing materials. When potential customers travel from a physical brochure to your social media profile to your website, they should see consistent imagery throughout their journey.
- Incorporate colors designed to attract attention. You only have a few seconds to convince a visitor to stay on your website. Color theory and psychology can help you choose the right options for your site design. For example, red denotes excitement and urgency, blue gives your company a trustworthy impression and purple gives people a high-class association.
- Match your audience's language. Pay attention to common phrases and styles used by your prospective customers. The website content for a small business catering to established professionals should be significantly different from one focusing on a teenage demographic. Incorporate this language into all aspects of your site, from your navigation to your privacy policy.
- Let visitors get in touch easily. Provide easy-to-use contact methods on your site and establish the expected response time. If you use a contact form, test it regularly to ensure it's working correctly.
- Test your site's usability. Many small-business owners test their designs across multiple browsers to confirm the site's basic functionality. Go one step further and put yourself in typical customers' shoes. Go through your site from their perspective and make notes about any difficulties in filling out forms, navigating through pages, etc. Even better, enlist friends and family members to test out your website.
- Keep it simple. Resist the urge to add every feature possible to your small-business site. A cluttered layout makes it difficult for customers to find the information they're interested in. They don't need to see the current time, temperature, news and other irrelevant details. You also improve your site's loading speed when you keep extras to a minimum.
The small details in your website design make a big difference in how potential customers perceive it. Use these tips to make your website into an impressive digital marketing tool. Your website should perform the digital marketing heavy lifting for your company, and these changes create a strong foundation for attracting more customers and revenue.