What you should not do when designing a small business website
In today’s technologically advanced world, where Internet has arguably become the most important medium for acquiring and sharing information, the need for a smart website cannot be neglected. Especially for small businesses, having a website that works is instrumental.
Internet users come to your website in search of related information and knowledge. Therefore, your primary goal should be to provide them with the best user experience. Along with quality content and proper SEO, website designing is one of the most important aspects of a website. It determines the value of impact your website makes on the visitors. Moreover, a flawless website design can single-handedly help you to achieve more sales, conversions and success.
Despite the importance of a flawless website design, many small businesses often make some common mistakes, which are enough to turn off a website visitor. Your website design should be able to engage your site’s visitor, and ultimately influencing their buyer behavior. Following are some of the most common mistakes, which are made by small businesses in their website designs, and some tips on how to rectify them.
1. Poor Navigation:
Navigation is one of the most important aspects for any website design. However, many small businesses do not pay much attention and end up with an extremely poor navigation system for their website.
A good navigation system successfully holds visitors at your website. The more time users spend on your website, the greater your chance is for increasing sales, conversions and profits. By applying some very simple, basic, but tested navigation techniques, you can easily achieve your objective of creating a website design with good navigability.
Search box, breadcrumb navigation trail, tag links, visually appealing icons, top-level navigation bar, related posts, brief descriptions, help tips and common terminologies like ‘about us’, ‘services’, ‘contact’ should be used to improve a website’s navigational structure.
2. No Direct Social Sharing Buttons:
Another very common mistake that many small businesses make with their website designs is that they do not put direct social sharing buttons. A good majority of business entrepreneurs still fail to realize the importance of social media for their business organizations.
To give you a basic idea about the importance of social networking websites for your business, have a look at the following statistics:
• Approximately 23% of a person’s online time is spent on social networking websites.
• According to the 2011 estimate, Facebook has over 800 million active users, of which, 400 million users log in daily.
• 53% of the active users tend to follow a brand – which may be yours.
• One out of every 5 users are believed to visit another social networking website right after he/she logs out of the 1st one. This makes it important for you to expand your business’s horizons to all the social networking platforms.
Such great statistics and estimates make it imperative for small businesses to integrate social media with their website designs.
3. No Focus Points:
Another very common mistake is to not insert any focus points in your website design. Focus points mean that your website design should be able to drive users the way it wants, for example, to more important links and to the call to action page.
4. Using Too Much Flash:
Using too much flash is another very notable mistake. Flash looks better but it has many negative impacts on a website’s design and its usability. Moreover, small businesses need to get exposed as much as possible. Though, using flash can seriously hurt your website’s search engine rankings.
5. Incompatible for Multiple Browsers, Resolutions and Mobile Devices:
One of the biggest mistakes by small businesses is to not making your website compatible for multiple browsers, resolutions and mobile devices.
According to an estimate by W3 Counter from a sample of 57,839 websites, 28.8% people used Internet Explorer, 26.4% used Google Chrome and 23.3% used Firefox. This means that your visitors use different browsers and they all must be accommodated.
17.95% use the 1366×768 resolution, 14.91% use 1024×768 and 12.91% use 1280×800. Moreover, from 2011, mobile users are also increased by 62%. Therefore, your website must be designed to be compatible across all platforms.
About the Author: Today’s article was written for the benefit of small business web design tips for business owners.
