Classic small business website design mistakes to avoid

With more and more small companies realising the benefits of going online, it is essential to appreciate the importance of having a well designed website, otherwise any efforts you make to drive potential clients to your web address will be in vain.

A poorly designed web site can affect your traffic building effort in two significant ways:

1. Poorly designed pages often perform badly on the major search engines. Chances are, if you haven't taken the time to produce a quality site, you will have forgotten to include correctly formatted "meta information" in your underlying code. This "meta information" (including the TITLE of the page, and a DESCRIPTION of what it's about) is used by Google and other search engines to help determine how well your pages perform in the search results pages. There are other factors which determine how highly ranked your pages become, but carefully written meta tags are among the most important.

2. If the visitors have arrived via search engines, reciprocal links, or otherwise, and your home page is attractively built and uncluttered, you have won the first part of the battle. Now, you must keep the visitors in your site. If navigation is poor, and your other pages are hard to find, any potential clients will leave rapidly.

If you are hiring someone to design a small business site for you, make sure they do not commit the following classic design errors:

Classic Web Design Mistakes

1. Poor navigation - Getting visitors to your home page is only the beginning of the battle. You want people to navigate the rest of your site, to increase page views and drive up response to articles and advertising features. So create clear and simple menu bars on your site, to facilitate this process.

2. Graphics – Whatever you do, keep graphics to a minimum, and ensure they are well designed and meaningful for the theme of your site. Slow loading graphics will kill off your visitor retention rate.

3. Timeliness – The Internet is the most up-to-date communications medium ever seen. Make sure your site appears current and topical. If you are unable to update your site on a daily basis with the 'what's new', you might consider including a date/time field within the structure of your pages.

4. Spelling and Grammar – If you are an information provider, double-check your text for typos before uploading. You may get away with the odd error, but you won't keep regular visitors if your site appears to have poor editorial control.

5. Code Structure – Wherever possible, try to keep your relevant text towards the top of your code. Search engines will analyse only the first few hundred words to determine your site rankings. Unnecessary JavaScript code towards the top of the page may have a direct impact on successful traffic building. Why not store the JavaScript separately, and reference it within your HTML? You should also aim to make your site accessible to all - see our dedicated article here.

6. Frames – Although rarely used these days, it is worth noting that many search engines cannot index frames. Unless frames are essential to your site design, we would recommend you leave them well alone.

7. Links – Make sure that your internal and external links are working. Other sites may change their web addresses from time to time, so you should check all links on occasion. There is nothing worse than clicking on a link and finding the classic error: '404 Error – Page does not exist'!

8. Use of fonts – Try to stick to a single font, using various sizes depending on the emphasis placed on each section of text. Many leading sites use 'Verdana' or 'Arial' as the standard, since they appear both business-like and user friendly.

Further Resources

Here are some useful articles on Bytestart to help you create you business website.

• Why do I need a small business website?
• Top 50 search engine optimisation tips
• How to build up links to your website