With more and more small companies reaping 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 have overlooked the importance of the major search engines in making your site visible to the marketplace, or alternatively you may have decided to over-optimise your site with a variety of dubious ‘SEO’ techniques which could put you under the thumb of Google’s latest clampdown on badly put-together websites.
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 customers will leave as quickly as they arrived.
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. Google is increasingly using ‘freshness’ of content as a ranking factor.
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 and other code snippets separately, and reference it within your HTML? You should also aim to make your site accessible to all.
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.
9. Social Media Overload – It is not mandatory to cover your website with social media buttons / Facebook ‘like’ icons / Twitter ‘follow’ icons. For many businesses which exist outside the social media buzz, there is little point trying to create a community site when your sole aim should be to provide an online brochure advertising your products and services, together with contact details and directions.
10. Simplicity – Often, the most successful sites are those which don’t try and do too much, and remain faithful to the aims of the business behind it. Always bear your audience in mind when designing a new site, and make information as easy to find as possible.
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