Small Business Web Design

In order for a website to work correctly there are many things to be considered:

Site download time
On page optimisation
User Friendly design
Page dimensions
Content
Install an analytics package

The above are all very important in the process of building a site and should be considered carefully.

Site download time is becoming an important issue and rumours have it that search engines are going to be looking at this more and more. Visitors to your website will not want to wait a long time for it to download; research has shown that users will only wait on average 8 seconds for a page download. If your site is too slow you will lose visitors to competitors. To speed up your site don’t add too many images and limit the amount of flash involved.

On page optimisation is crucial if you want search engines to find your website. With more and more people using search engines to find websites and information you really need to carefully select what keywords, descriptions and page titles you use. Think about what words people will use to search for you and make sure that they are included in the title, description and keywords. By doing this you will be found by search engines. An SEO specialist can help you with this.

Make sure your website has a user friendly design; you need to think about where certain things should be such as menus and content. Most people get used to looking in certain places for menus and links so if you put yours in an unusual place they won’t be able to find it and will leave. Other things to consider are colour schemes don’t over do it as it will confuse your users, do make it appealing though.

Page dimensions can be a difficult one, if you are using a large widescreen monitor then your design may look good but to someone who is using a smaller screen it can be a bad experience. Do not make the page too wide because users with smaller screens will have to navigate horizontally which is a big turn off for most users. Height isn’t such a big issue as users do not mind scrolling down a page, but this said don’t go over board.

Content is probably one of the most important components of any site. Search engines love content and it looks like they always will. New updated content gives them something to read and makes your website more important to them helping you become more visible. This said don’t just write any old thing on there as the most important aspect is that users who come onto your site want to find what they are looking for and easily so don’t babble. Content can also come in the form of blogs so make sure your website has an integrated blog as this way any updates are new and fresh and on your site. Content can also contain good keywords which again will appeal to search engines.

Obviously you will want to know how many visitors your site has and where they have come from; you would be surprised at the amount of websites designed without this in mind. Without analytics you do not know what is going on, it is like having a store and not knowing how many visitors are coming in. If you have an e-commerce site then by not knowing your visitors you will not know your conversion rate of sales. If you know that 1000 people visit your site each week but you are only selling 10 items something is wrong, you can then look at your site design, products and pricing to understand what is putting people off. Analytics is vital to understanding your web site.

Having a website is a great way to showcase your business or personal interests but if it isn’t optimised then nobody can find it and it will be just out there not creating any interest.