No matter what your web designer tells you, simplicity is best when building your small business website. A site with lots of bright colors and flashy interactive graphics might win web design awards, but it will probably not help you win customers. The more complicated your web design, the higher the risk that your sales message gets lost amidst the fancy bells and whistles on your site.
For most small businesses, a simple and elegant four or five page website is all they need to get the job done. If you want your website to increase your profits instead of emptying your pocketbook, pay close attention to these guidelines when you build your site.
Make Your Website Easy to Read
For your website to generate sales and leads, your small business website design needs to be user and consumer friendly, which means it needs to be easy to read. Short sentences and paragraphs, dark text on white or very light backgrounds, and plenty of white space should be the norm.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the purpose of a small business website is not to win design awards. It is to convey information that guides the consumer toward a buying decision in your favor.
You might think dark backgrounds or colored text on colored backgrounds look more striking, and you may be right. But loud colors and excessive graphics distract attention from your sales message and make your site harder to read. Keep it simple, and you will keep the sale.
Web users tend to scan text rather than read it start to finish, especially on mobile. Since most visitors will not read every word, use headlines, subheadings, and bolded text to convey your message quickly. Done correctly, a visitor should be able to scan your headlines and bold text in a few seconds and understand your site’s central message, a habit that also supports on page SEO.
Make Your Website Easy to Navigate
Since the main purpose of your site is to convey information, design it so that information is easy to find. Make it easy for visitors to navigate your site, and they will thank you with their business. Make it difficult, and they will leave before you can say back button.
Small Business and Retail Website Design Ideas
At a minimum, every page should carry a navigation bar with a link back to your homepage and to every top level page on your site. Some sites use breadcrumbs for this, a trail of links showing each page a visitor has viewed since landing on the site.
Make sure there are no broken links anywhere on your website. A broken link may not seem like a big deal to you, but to a visitor who clicked expecting more information, it is a major frustration. Fix your broken links regularly, and check again after every update.
Easy navigation also helps search engines crawl and index your pages, which can improve your visibility in organic search over time. A clean site structure, paired with ongoing search engine optimization work, gives visitors and search engines good reason to stick around.
Make Sure Your Website Loads Quickly
Internet speeds have improved enormously since this guideline was first written, but page speed still makes or breaks a small business website. Visitors today expect a page to load in well under three seconds, and search engines factor loading speed into how they rank your site, so a slow page costs you both visitors and rankings.
Keep photos, graphics, and animations to a tasteful minimum, compress your images before uploading them, and avoid autoplay background music or video, since these add load time and can annoy visitors enough to make them leave. A good caching setup and properly sized images go a long way toward keeping pages lean.
It is also worth building your site with a responsive, mobile friendly layout from the start, so visitors get the same fast, easy experience whether they are browsing on a phone, tablet, or desktop.
Faster, better optimized pages also make it easier for search engines to crawl and rank your site, an added bonus for keeping your page weight low and your load times fast.
These three guidelines, easy to read, easy to navigate, and fast to load, will help you build a small business website that earns you more sales and leads. A site that is enjoyable to browse builds customer loyalty and encourages repeat visits.
Costs vary depending on the number of pages, the level of custom design, and whether you need e-commerce or booking features. A simple four or five page small business website is generally the most affordable option, and it is often all a small business needs. Kumbh Design scopes each website design project after understanding your goals so you only pay for what you actually need.
Search engines use page speed as a ranking factor, and slow pages also cause visitors to leave before they see your content. Compressing images, using a good caching setup, and keeping your design lean all help your pages load in well under three seconds, which supports both user experience and your search engine optimization performance.
Yes. Every website Kumbh Design builds uses a responsive, mobile friendly layout so it looks and performs well on phones, tablets, and desktops alike. This is essential today, since a large share of small business website visitors browse on mobile devices first.
