A website design needs to reflect you, your company, and your products or services that you provide. It needs to reflect your personality. And, even when you can check off all these things, it needs to do one more thing: it needs to appeal to your user community.

You may love your website design, but if it doesn’t appeal to the user community, it is a dud. A bad website design can be devastating: a lack of visitors, non-enthusiastic users, and lackluster sales.

When you start to think about a website design, think about the website design by placing yourself in your users shoes. These are the pieces and parts that will go a long way to a successfully developed website, a website that your user community will be positive about. Simply, these pieces make it easier for your visitor to use your site.

Easy To Navigate Interface – Users need to be able to move or navigate your site. Group similar content so that the user is not clicking back and forth from one page to another page. A simple and thoroughly thought through navigation bar layout is a must.

Whitespace Is Your Friend – Users do not like large paragraphs that run all the way down through a website design. Make paragraphs short and leave empty lines between paragraphs. Short paragraphs make your text appear as if it is easier to read. Isn’t this short paragraph easy on the eyes?

Easy To Understand – What is the purpose of your website? Make sure your website clearly and concisely conveys your message. You cannot assume that the user community understands your thoughts. Write short, solid paragraphs that have a point. Make sure this one purpose is easy to complete and ensure every element on a give page helps the user take that specific action.

Consistency Is King – Consistency matters. When choosing fonts, type sizes, and colors be consistent. Review the pages and make sure that the text is in the same font. Make sure headers are consistent across the pages. An inconsistent look and feel sticks out like a sore thumb!

Use Flash Sparingly – Remember when every website used to have a silly flash intro page that required you to click through before seeing the content? If your site still has a page like this you are certainly loosing customers, get rid of it now. Never use flash or any other frilly add-ons unless absolutely necessary. Most users prefer clean simple sites that load fast.

Don’t Make the User Wait – If you must load some sort of video or music, make sure you allow the user the capability to turn it off. Your webpages and site as a whole should load quickly. If it does not load quickly the user is bound to move on. To analyze the speed of your page, you might try the YSlow and Page Speed add-ons for Mozilla Firefox or Chrome.

Spend Time Looking at Existing Websites – While noted last, this is one of the things you will start with. Go out and look at other websites including competing webpages. Do the research upfront. What other websites do your users already like? Which websites do not appeal to your user base? Why? Take this information with you and use it as a base for inspiration in your next website design.

You just read seven ways to optimize your website design from a users point of view. Make sure these pieces are included in your next website design or revise your current website design now.

Your website design does not magically come together by itself. You must carefully think through the design of your website and how your website ideas can be configured in such a way to meet your goals.

We are stripping down website design and exposing you to the basic components which will help you think through your website ideas. Just like arms and legs are to a person, these parts or components are important to a website. These components make the website attractive, easy to navigate, searchable, establish viability, promote interaction, enhance your marketing efforts, and provide information to prospects.

This article was written specifically for you the business owner or the person in your company who will be working with an outside website design company. This article may also be helpful for professionals who own or work at professional website design companies.

Domain Name – Your Domain name is the address used to locate your website. Think carefully about your domain name; it identifies you and your site. It can be difficult to nearly impossible to change later without having major implications.

A good domain name is memorable and establishes credibility or viability. When you are thinking about a domain name, think about its length and ease of typing for customers. You do not want your user community to get frustrated typing your domain name or forgetting it completely.

Tips:
• If your domain name contains your main keyword you may have an advantage in the search engine rankings.
• Is the domain name descriptive of what you are trying to sell?
• Is the domain name too short and not really convey what you do?

Web Hosting – The web hosting company provides access to your website via the Internet. If the hosting company is down, your site is down!

Think about the technical specifics of your proposed website. Do you want to sell products from your site (eCommerce)? Do you expect high traffic?

We strongly recommend a large national hosting company. They usually have low prices, better up-time guarantees, and more upgrade options than mom and pop hosting companies. Your best website design deserves the best web hosting available!

Tips:
• Write requirements down on a piece of paper
• Include both technical (database needs, traffic projections) and non-technical (cost) requirements
• Use this list to compare web hosting companies

Branding – A professional website design is not complete until you include your logo and overall branding strategy. Branding may include your logo, fonts, and other elements. The logo and branding are critical to your website design.

Adding your logo and matching your company’s brand allows you to portray the personality of your company. The logo and other branding efforts are what makes your website design unique to you and your company. When a prospect or customer visits your site there should be no doubt in their mind that this is your website and not a competitors.

Standard Site Pages – The majority of websites in existence today have a least a few pages in common. These common pages include the following: home page, about, contact, privacy policy.

• Home – When someone visits your domain name they usually land on your home page. Your home page only has a few seconds to capture the visitors attention and direct them to the specific content they came looking for. So, think through your website design ideas to ensure you maximize your home page’s effectiveness.
• About – The about page is usually one of the most often clicked pages on a website’s navigation bar. Since the about page is visited so often it makes sense to include information about your specific niche. After this niche specific information an opt-in box allowing visitors to sign-up to receive more of your great content is often a wise website design idea. After the opt-in box you can place general company information or information about yourself followed by another opt-in box.
• Contact Us – The contact page is the perfect place to put all of your companies contact details. This may include information such as your phone number, physical address, email address, and a map with directions to your business. Providing a simple contact form can also be a smart idea. The most basic forms include name, email, and message but can extended to capture an array of additional information.
• Privacy Policy – Search Engines like a privacy policy because it establishes validity of your site. A privacy policy should include information detailing how you will use the information you collect from your website. It establishes the fact that you consider the users’ information important and that you are going to safeguard this information.

Captivating Content – Creating content is the most challenging part of the website ideas strategy and website design. Content can be defined as the the pages or posts that are specific to what your business does. Content can be made up of combination of text, images, video, and audio. The content might be your product pages, sales pages, or various other pages or posts. This is the “meat” of your site that makes it different than any other website on the Internet. Give away as much content as possible.

Website Layout – The website layout is the overall look and feel of your website design. This can include items such as a header, logo, other branding elements, navigation bar, and the specific placement of your content. A professional website design can help to organize your content and maximize your call to action.

Call To Action – The call to action is simply the process you want your users to take. A call to action could be to fill in an opt-in form, make a purchase, comment on a post, call your business, etc. The call to actions are limitless but you site should only have one or small few specific actions or goals you want the user to take. Too many call to actions can be confusing and distracting resulting in the user exiting your webpage without doing anything.

Website Feedback – No website design nor will your website design ideas be perfect on the first attempt. A website requires a starting point (your first website design) but then requires testing or split testing and tweaking to improve the rate of successful call to actions. Testing can be done with simple analytics such as Google Analytics. In addition you may need more complicated testing methods including user surveys, heat tracking tools, etc. With a bit of testing and tweaking you will be able to dramatically improve the effectiveness of your call to action.

Meta Data – Meta data is text added to specific areas of your website that provides additional information about an element or page on your site. Meta data is commonly seen on pages in the form of custom title tags, meta descriptions, and meta keywords. This meta data exists to help your search engine optimization efforts. In addition, this text serves to make your page more user friendly.

Meta data can also be present with images in the form of alt text. Everyone loves pictures or other graphics on a webpage. The problem is that, in and of themselves, pictures or graphics are not searchable. Adding alt text can improve the search engines ability to index your content. Meta data is extremely important and any professional website design company will be sure to incorporate meta tags into your website design.

Site Map – A Site Map visually displays the framework or organization of the content on your site. In addition to a visual site map search engines rely on a search engine friendly site map format such as XML to fully index every page of your site.

Content Management System (CMS) – A CMS provides an easy way to add and manage content on your website. We highly recommend a CMS of some kind in every website design. Without a CMS, adding or making changes to pages can be a real pain. Ensure your next website design has a CMS and you will be much happier the next time you need a change made. In addition, a CMS usually provides a stable platform for which you can build upon in the future. The only CMS we use and recommend is WordPress.

Website Promotion – Promoting your website does not traditionally fit into the components of a website or website design. However, several tactics can be implemented into your site to make the promotion of your content easier for your users. Below is a list of a few website promotion strategies that can help to get the word out for your website and also make the most of the traffic you may already be receiving.

• Blogging – Blogging stated simply is posting quality content articles to your website. Most CMS systems include blogs when setting up a website or one can easily be added through the use of plugins.
• Social Media – Social media includes using all of the viral sharing tools available to create relationships with your prospects and customers. Some of the larger social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Many of these social networks can easily be integrated into your webpages to allow customers to share your content with others. Voila, free traffic!
• Email Capture – Capturing email address through an opt-in form does not actually increase the new user traffic to your site per say but it can get your prospects or customers to return regularly to your site. Using email marketing can be a simple way to boost your bottom line or revenue per customer. If you don’t use email marketing you should implement it now. We use AWeber to handle all of our email marketing needs.
• Paid Advertising – The fastest way to get traffic to your webpage is to buy it. You can get all the traffic you could possibly want and more if you just pay for it. Some options for paid traffic include pay per click search engine advertising, newspaper ads, magazine ads, social networking site ads, mobile ads, etc.
• Guest Posting – Guest posting is creating posts or articles for use on other’s blogs. This is a simple tactic in which you find a related blog and provide a high quality article for use on their blog, usually with no financial payment to you. Most blogs will allow one or two links back to your own website in the author resource box which is generally at the bottom of an article. This method can catapult traffic to your website if done right.

For example, since we do website design we may reach out to a website hosting company with a larger audience than ourselves. If their customers liked the article they are likely to click the link in the resource box to come back to our website. Hence, generating lots of targeted traffic we never otherwise would have been able to get on our own.

You were just exposed to the components of website design. You now have the knowledge to site down and make a plan for your next website design. With these components in mind you will know exactly what website ideas your website developer needs to accomplish your project.

Website, website, website; do you need a website? As a business owner, have you ever said or thought the following:

• This business has been in my family for 20 years. We have a solid reputation. What do I need a website for?
• Hey, business is not the greatest, but the economy is not the greatest either. We are still holding it together, is a website necessary?
• My business is new, but we are picking up a few customers every month. We are OK.
• Our potential customers are located all over the country. How do I reach them?
• Our competitor just won that new, big job. What do they have that we do not have?
• We have a great website. Seriously. It was developed 7 years ago. We haven’t touched it since.
• We know we need a website, we just cannot figure out how to pay for it.
• What if we had a site, how would we update it?

Simply put, if you do not have a site your business is invisible! Without your own web presence, new customers cannot find you. Without a web presence you cannot keep your customers up to date on new products, services, information, and other important happenings. You cannot sell you or your business!

Even so, according to a recent survey by Wix, 51% of small businesses don’t have websites.

Despite widespread availability of high speed Internet and access to WiFi, some businesses are still doing business the old way. But, understand this, the Yellow Pages are antiquated. Information contained in the Yellow Pages will not keep your customers updated, will not provide real time information, and will not provide all pertinent information. Period.

So, why do you need a website?

• Many people that do not step into a store without going online first
• Many people that do not step a foot into a store at all. That is, they do all their shopping online
• If you want to be found, you need a website
• If you want to provide customers with information about you, your company, and your products, you need a website
• Your website serves as a digital business card or digital billboard
• Your website is your digital salesman, available at all hours of the day and night helping to promote YOU

So, what are you waiting for? Get your website started now with a small business website design package today.