Effective Website Design for Small Business

Effective Web Design – How do you do it?

Web designers or small businesses, whoever you are, all you want when you create a website is a website that works.. Not just in terms of SEO but so that your customers enjoy your website and choose to investigate it, navigate through your pages and eventually purchase a product or contact you about a service.

Within this article I want to focus on a subject that frustrates me most as an internet marketing professional. The good the bad and the effective web design.

On a weekly basis I look at many websites, mostly they are created well and require minimal correction and just some tinkering with to climb search rankings. But all too regularly I am coming up against some horrible mistakes and websites that well… Simply need to be started again!

Websites can be built in many languages; the most common languages are CSS, HTML, Flash and Javascript. There are many more programmes available the more exotic the programme, usually the more useless it is!

Although I regularly use Flash and Javascript within website design, an effective website should be predominantly made up of HTML and CSS. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets make up the layout of the site. HTML lays out the coding and script, it is the HTML that is read by search engines to determine a sites content.

If you are thinking about creating your first website please focus on a simple design don’t over complicate things by using flashy or over-creative programmes to build it. Please follow the following tips and hopefully then you will have a good looking effective layout that is enjoyed by your websites visitors.

1) Defined means of navigation: Once a visitor lands on your site they need to navigate around it. Not just a hard to find pop down menu but a clear and defined menu that takes potential customers to the key categories within the site. One navigation isn’t always enough, try and build multiple means to navigate around the site into it.

2) Build the site from just CSS and HTML: If it is you or you instructing a web designer keep it simple. Using CSS to control the colours, spacing and general look of the site makes for a nice and potentially effective site. HTML is the primary and most commonly used language spoken by search engines and their robots. By relying on HTML and CSS you are focusing search engines to read only the HTML and the internet browsers to read the CSS, this means that the two programmes most essential to your websites success can not be confused. If you have a particular tool or function that requires Javascript, or your headers need flash to make them come alive then use it, just use it sparingly.

3) Clean layout: Sounds simple but it isn’t keeping a site clean and un-complicated, especially when you have a lot to say can be difficult. If you do have a lot of content try breaking it up and categorising it on different pages, after all the more pages you have specific to a particular subject, the more pages you have that can be indexed by search engines and potentially be ranked with search engine results pages. Don’t use heavy coloured or patterned backgrounds either, this makes the content hard to read and makes the site look messy. Additionally, if customers are finding your site via a handheld device it makes it near impossible for them to see it.

4) Optimising the load up time of a website: Making sure that your site loads quickly and looks the way it should within seconds of a customer clicking onto it. This stops the evermore impatient web users stay with your site. If you have a whole page of images this will take a long while to load, if the coding or script behind your page is full of unnecessary HTML, tags or just rubbish, clean it up. Sometimes you have precious seconds to impress or gain the trust of a new visitor; long load times put people of very quickly!

5) Make sure your site works in different browsers: People tend to view web pages in many different types and sizes of browsers so make sure that your site looks the same in all of them. There is nothing worse than opening a web page and seeing that half of it is missing, so make sure that you or your web designer checks that it looks the same in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari plus all of the different size screens that your customers use.

If you take into account all of the above points you should be well on your way to a good looking and effective website https://www.internetmarketingstrategy.co.uk/website-design, effective websites mean successful businesses!