Top Tips for Website Design

1. NAVIGATION: How easy is it to navigate your website? As a business, it is important to you that potential customers can access the information they need. Links to key aspects of your site need to be clear and easy to find. If a potential client has to jump through too many hoops to get where they want they will probably give up! After all, they’re probably using the internet because, like most of the human race, they can’t stand automated telephone answering programmes! Take pity and make life easy for them.
2. CLUTTER-FREE WEBSITES: We’d recommend avoiding the temptation to “overdo” things. It might be that you have a lot of things you want to tell your customers. Information overload can be a huge turn-off, however, and trying to hit visitors with too much info can have the opposite effect. Similarly, whilst you want your site to appear visually interesting overdoing the graphics and animations can just distract from the business of providing the client with what they visited the site for.
3. IMAGES: Are a must for any business website. Potential clients like to see the human faces behind your business – so feature your staff looking friendly & helpful (perhaps not using photos of the office fancy dress party!). Also, images of your product are key when attracting buyers. Just one little thing though, better not to use images at all then use poor-quality images or images which don’t present the desired impression of your business.
4. ATMOSPHERE: The look of your website needs to convey something about the style and feel of your business. A site which relates to a health spa, for instance, is going to fall rather flat if it adopts a metallic, minimalist style. That might be great for a construction company, or even an architect, but a health spa really should feel warm, soothing and welcoming. Colours, texture of background, choice of border and artwork all help to make an impression about the experience of doing business with your company.
5. CONTACT US: I put this in recognising that I risk sounding patronising but, honestly, the number of websites where it’s almost impossible to find contact details is quite shocking. I’ve even had problems on sites where the WHOLE POINT of the site is to elicit contact from readers! So, basic though the point is, ensure that if someone visits your website they can contact you. This should be easy to find and you should provide the FULL RANGE of contact details. Email, post, fax and telephone. Personally, I wouldn’t even consider buying from a site where I couldn’t find contact details. If those details are well hidden, I ask myself “why?” and head off somewhere else.
6. SEARCH: On a site with plenty of content, the ability to search the website for a specific piece of information is useful. We all know that supermarkets occasionally move the shelves around so we have to visit every aisle to do our shopping. Such skulduggery does not go down well with internet users! What will “sell” your website, your product and your business is the ease with which the user can get the info they want. If they want to read a history of your company, they will. But some might want to cut to the chase and find out how much a red sofa will cost them!