10 Steps to a Better Website - #5 Design your site

I was explaining to my wife once how the internal combustion engine worked. After a while she said, “I don’t care about all that, and I don’t want to know or learn about all that, I just want it to start and run when I turn the key”.
Small business owners sometimes that feel that same way about a website; they usually don’t want to know about all the technical stuff. They just want it to be functional, work right, and make a good first impression. In these 10 Steps I am just passing on things I learned that were helpful to in the beginning.

The home page of your website must capture the attention of visitors, drawing them into your site within about 2-3 seconds or your visitors will disappear as quickly as they came. The page design and navigation have to be clear and direct to keep them there.

You’ve heard the saying, “one picture is worth a thousand words,” but have you really thought about that? A good graphic design and pictures can communicate, but along with those, you must also have the right words regarding your business, if you to come up in the search engines.

Search robots don’t read graphics and pictures, so you will need alt text under them. Many times I see a home page that has lots of graphics and flash, and very little text or no text at all. That is great for humans, but if you want to rank well in the search engines, in the organic search, you need text as well. Plan for that in the design of how it will look.

Get the visitors’ attention quickly. Tell them who you are and what they will find on your site. Make it easy to find information. Site navigation plays a big role in how long visitors stay and explore.

The first time visitors will quickly glance over the content and then look around to locate the information they searched for. Put the important part of your site within two clicks; don’t make potential customers drill down through multiple layers of links to find your important information.

A clean layout that uses a lot of white space improves legibility and encourages visitors to read the content on your website. Keep the number of fonts, font styles, and colors to a minimum. Younger visitors are OK with really small print; older visitors find small print difficult to read. (medium size about like Arial 12 is usually about right)

The focus should be on the content. Over done Flash is an aggravation. Use animation sparingly. A lot of different fonts, styles, colors, and animation will only project an amateurish image anyway. You should design each page to be under 40k in size. Use graphics, Flash animations, and scripts only as really needed because they make it take longer for the visitor to download it. Design pages for easy viewing on a typical 15-inch computer monitor.

Your website, just like your store location, is judged initially on its appearance. Whether it is a website or brick and mortar store, the first impression lasts a very long time and may never change.

I like to look at a mock-up or storyboard of the designers’ ideas before starting to build out the site. Make sure your happy with that first. Have several people you trust to give you’re their honest opinion on the design mock up before it is built out. Then you’ll be happy with your design when you see your site live online. There are millions of websites but probably only a few that would be your direct competition. Design your site to look as good or better than those.