Archive for month: January, 2014

If you are starting your own online business, then your web design needs to attract and hold the attention of potential customers. It takes more than fancy graphics or dazzling displays to build your customer base.

The secret to success when it comes to effective web design lies mostly in providing what customers want in terms of easy access, intuitive navigation and interesting content. Naturally, you will have to select a niche area where your website can be seen as an “authority”, but that is backed by having the right support to ensure that visitors become customers.

What follows are 10 effective tips in creating the best web design for your business. Each of these tips is fairly straightforward, but together they make a great combination that will help pull in visitors and create customers.

1.) Keep Things Simple

The old saying “Keep it simple, stupid” is just as relevant for effective web design. You don’t want to overwhelm visitors with a myriad of colors, menu choices and glaring advertisements. A simpler, more straightforward website is actually appreciated by visitors because they are more interested in the information, products and services that you provide rather than how “pretty” your website appears

2.) Choose the Best Color Scheme

People associate certain colors with particular subjects. White and blue for example are often associated with medically-oriented information while bright reds, pinks and other “loud” colors are associated with punk rock bands. Whatever products or subject matter you are presenting on your website, it needs to be presented in an appropriate color scheme. This brings in the right atmosphere for your online business and helps to keep visitors coming back. Do a little research on your competitors to see what they offer.

3.) Highlight Menu Bar

This is one of those really simple steps that so many people overlook. By highlighting your menu bar in a color separate from the rest of the color scheme of the website, you make navigation that much simpler. Good, intuitive navigation is one of the key elements of all successful online businesses. The easier you make it for customers to find what they want, the more they will buy from you.

4.) Speed Up Load Time

Your web pages should load onto basically any computer, laptop or mobile device in less than 2 seconds, tops. Slow load times easily discourage visitors who will abandon your website and go somewhere else. So be sure to test your webpages on slower internet speeds and mobile devices just to be sure. By compressing css files, coding your pages to optimal speeds and using Google to host javascript files, you can speed up your web design considerably.

5.) Create the Proper Structure

Good structure is what you find in newspapers, magazines and periodicals where the reader is easily taken from one source of information to another. Your website needs to be logically structured so that visitors can quickly find the information that they seek. The structure of your website should be straightforward, such as the menu bar near the top, the latest news or information displayed in a headline, pertinent older information such as blog reports, coupons, discount and such lined up on one side and so forth. The more logical you structure your website the easier it is to captivate your visitor.

6.) Simplified Lead Collection

Getting the name and email address of visitors is standard procedure in obtaining leads, but you should not do anymore than that in terms of getting information. This is because for customers, spending time handing over information about them is an uncomfortable process. The longer it lasts, the less likely they are to participate. So just keep it to email addresses and names for your newsletters and other lead generating campaigns.

7.) Proper Font Size

This is one of the more interesting aspects of proper web design, the size of the fonts that you use. Not too large and not too small may seem somewhat generalized, but you should use only a single font for your content and then use different fonts for titles of pages and such for highlighting purposes. Plus, the fonts you choose should not be garish, tiny or unreadable.

8.) Enhance the Checkout Process

Many sales are lost when customers get confused about how to pay for an item, so all that work in getting them to your website is for naught because of a single hiccup in the purchasing process. Your website checkout center should be simple and inviting, making it easy to purchase the products that you have. Be sure to test this process to ensure that it is working smoothly.

9.) Regular Content Updates

Too many online businesses focus on getting people to their website in the first place, but do not offer a reason for them to come back. Since repeat customers are the main source of income for most businesses, your website design should incorporate that fact through regular content updates. This means regularly updating your content, adding new information, launching new marketing campaigns and so forth to keep people coming back.

10.) Use Plenty of Calls to Action

Perhaps your customers are not buying because you haven’t asked them. Calls to action are an important part of effective web design. You don’t have to overdo it, but effective calls to action helps convinced many customers to go ahead and make that purchase. If you use splash pages in particular, then calls to action are a must. However, good web design incorporates effective calls to action when needed, such as when offering new discounts or promoting new products.

These are just 10 ways your business web design can improve dramatically by incorporating simple, basic themes into the content. All of these tips will help your web design achieve the goal of greater visitor conversion to customers who come back to your website on a repeated basis. The better you tailor your web design to pull in and keep repeating customers, the more profits you will earn by selling more products and services. Effective online business web design means better customer service and higher sales as well.