When designing a website, everybody sets off to create the best possible design for their business. You pick a font, color palette and start creating. You’ll think “This will be an amazing website! Some music, big call out headlines, flashy colors to attract attention”. Great in theory, but in practice customers will not know how fast to close their browser window to get away from it!
There are some easy tips and tricks that will help you design a website people will want to spend time on.
Fonts overload
While you might be tempted by all those beautiful and artsy fonts out there, it’s best to stick to 2 or 3 different fonts. Pick a bold and eye-catching one for your headline and an easy-on-the-eye font for the body copy.
We love using San Serif fonts throughout.
CTA’s galore
CTA’s (Call To Actions) are an important part of your web design; they invite your visitor to shop, sign up to your newsletter or your social sites. Too many (flashy) choices will fry their brains and send them running.
Make sure to use only clear call-to-actions and close the deal in as few clicks as possible. The longer the journey, the more likely they will stray.
Keywords keywords keywords
Obviously, you want to rank high in Google searches, but using certain keywords over and over to do so may actually have an opposite effect: Google’s machines are smart enough to detect these type of tricks and it will result in a low ranking in their results.
Magicdust suggests, “you just write naturally like you would when speaking to your (potential) client. Use some keywords, but do not overdo it.”
Cheerful tunes
You may be a musician trying to promote himself or perhaps you simply love to have music on while you work, but having autoplay music on a website is not more than a nuisance. With penetration rates around 80% for mobile devices, the chance is rather big your customers will visit your website when amongst other people. Chances are they’ll set a record in closing the browser window and gone is your potential client.
We’d rather recommend giving the website visitor a choice to play music, or not. A clearly visible player with a play button will do the trick just fine.
Bad imagery
Surely you have seen this before: restaurants in touristy areas with big, homemade pictures of their dishes. The quality of the images is so bad, it makes the food looks horrible. Personally, I feel like running in the opposite direction when I see a restaurant like that.
The same holds true for websites with a poor imagery selection. Either the imagery is esthetically not attractive or they look too pixelated as the sizing is wrong.
Rather invest some time and money in getting the imagery right, than to use poor quality creative. After all, a picture says more than a 1000 words!
Going wide
While you may think you can get more information across on your homepage when your website is not only scrollable vertically, but also horizontally, it, in fact, is very counter-intuitive: people are used to scrolling down, not sideways. It will only cause confusion with your site visitor.
Full homepage
You may feel tempted to share your entire story and business offer on your homepage. After all, isn’t this what visitors see first and you want to make sure they know what great product you offer, right?
Nope, too much information is an overkill and works counterproductive. Invest a bit of time in a concise and clear summary of what you do and let some well-picked visuals do the work for you.
Create a simple menu structure that allows website visitors to navigate your site easily to find out more if they need and want to.
Once you have the design in ship shape, you can then consider: The Heart Of A Small Business Is Not Only Its Web Design But Its Website Traffic.
