Just as an attractive storefront is important for a brick-and-mortar business, a well-optimized website is also important for an online business. A substandard appearance will scare off potential customers and drive them away before they even see your product.
Keep in mind that users tend to make instant judgments about a website’s trustworthiness in just 15 seconds based on the site’s design and content. If you’re a small business, or any other type of business, you can’t afford to turn potential customers away at first glance.
A well-designed website conveys professionalism. An attractive, thoughtful layout and well-presented information can do wonders for your website, including an 84% increase in time spent and a 132% increase in annual sales. Here are some practical web design tips to help you impress your visitors, earn their loyalty, and grow your business.
1. Start with strategy
For most customers, your website is often the first point of contact with your brand. It sets the tone for future interactions, so it needs to reflect your company’s values and connect with your customers. The first step is to focus on your target audience. Thoroughly research what this audience is like in terms of demographics, what their interests are, and what kind of content they respond to.
You can use this information to design your ideal customer journey and influence that customer journey through the design of your small business website.
You may also want to consider how potential customers come to your website, whether through search, recommendations, email, etc.
This ensures continuity of communication and ensures a seamless customer experience from start to finish.
2. Establish a consistent brand identity
A consistent design language helps build and strengthen your brand identity for your visitors. This includes her website elements such as colors, fonts, logo, and layout. Different viewers often identify with different types of her web designs. If you’re a small business, you can use this to create a website that appeals to potential customers. Color in particular has a strong impact on recognition and can increase brand awareness by 80%. When used in conjunction with fonts, you can create a unique identity that reflects the personality of both your brand and its customers.
3. Insert space
A good web design tip is to add white space to your layouts. It may seem a little counterintuitive, but white space can greatly improve the user experience and make your website easier to read.
Once you understand most of the elements on the page, add some visual breaks to help your visitors process the information. You can also keep your website clutter-free so users aren’t overwhelmed with content. Strategically placed white space, when placed properly, can draw attention to your unique selling points, product design, CTAs, and other elements you want people to notice.
4. Simplify navigation
Navigation optimization is one of the most underrated small business web design tips. If your visitors can’t quickly find what they’re looking for on your website, they’ll leave your site. Consider how category, subcategory, product, and service pages are designed. Do you follow a logical structure that allows users to quickly search to find the information they need? Ideally, category pages should appear in the main navigation bar, and the rest of your site structure should follow this. Consider adding breadcrumb navigation in addition to sticky navigation menus so users can reflect on their journey.
5. Optimize for mobile
One of the most important things you can do as a small business is make sure your web design is optimized for mobile and other non-desktop devices. More than half of all website traffic comes from mobile devices. Over 73% of people will abandon a website if it is not responsive to the device they are viewing it on. Google indexes the mobile version of your website first. Not having this can affect your SEO and search rankings. There are many things you can do to make your small business website design mobile-friendly. First, optimize your content for mobile devices. Make your product images the focal point and use as little above-the-fold text as possible. Make sure users don’t have to scroll to find her CTA. You might also want to consider navigation.
This is more difficult for smaller devices. Consider adding a collapsible “hamburger menu” to save screen space .
6. Fix SEO .
No matter how well-designed your website is, it won’t help your small business if it can’t be found.
Over 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search. Optimizing your website for search engines is not only important, it’s also essential for business growth. Good SEO best practices include using keywords throughout your web copy to make it clear to Google and other search engines what your website is about. Make sure the keywords you choose are relevant to your target audience. You can find keywords using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Ah refs, and SEMrush.
You can also research your competitors to see what types of keywords and web designs other small businesses are using. Other ways to improve SEO include optimizing your web page headings and metadata, as well as addressing technical details such as: B. Using XML sitemaps and schema markup.
7. Improving page loading speed
How fast your website loads can have a big impact on your business. When page load speed increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, the likelihood that a user will bounce from the page increases by 32%. Customers generally have less patience with confusing websites. It is also an important factor in search rankings as it affects the user experience. In a competitive digital environment, you want to do everything you can to ensure a longer customer journey. This is part of small business web design because elements on the page, such as the size of images and video files, can affect how fast the page loads. You can compress images and optimize videos to take up less space. Other ways to make your website load faster include resolving hosting issues and using a content delivery network (CDN).
8. Put contact details and CTAs above the fold
A useful tip when designing a small business website is to make sure your users have quick and easy access to your contact information at any time. Ideally, this information should be visible above the fold on her website. This is the part of the page that visitors can see without scrolling.
Contact information typically includes a business address, email address, phone number, and social links. Most businesses choose to place his call-to-action (CTA) on most of their websites and redirect to the contact page. Her CTA button, which resides on every page (header, etc.), is a good way to make sure customers can always find it. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your CTAs too.
There’s no need to stick to traditional “buy now” or “learn more” options. Small businesses can experiment with their web designs to include catchy prompts such as “For a treat,” “Check it out,” or even “Hurry!” Get it while supplies last!
9.Personalize your user experience (UX)
User experience can make or break a website. UX refers to a user’s overall experience when browsing a website, including usability. Everything about the design of a small business’s website impacts the user experience, including fonts, color schemes, content, navigation, checkout, and support features. It’s critical that businesses not just provide a “good” user experience, but a personalized experience. This includes using available information such as web behavior, location, demographics, and user journeys to personalize website functionality. These features include product recommendations, optimized content, offers, and more.
