Top Design Tips For Building A Business Website That Provides Genuine Value
Whether you’re running a large multinational company or a small sole proprietorship, having an attractive website is essential. It ensures that once visitors find their way to your site, they’re incentivised to hang around.
Making a website is easy, but making one that provides genuine value is a little trickier. If you’re currently constructing or upgrading your site but aren’t sure about how to design it, you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, we’ll go over some top tips for building a business website that grabs (and keeps) the attention of all your potential customers.
Make sure visitors can easily find your assets
No matter what kind of website you’re building, you’ll most likely need to upload external assets onto your pages. If you’re running a site for your e-commerce business, it’s imperative to include pictures of your products, while you might be uploading work samples in the form of PDFs if you’re hosting a portfolio website. This visual information should not be hard to find on your site.
To make sure that your website provides genuine value for your visitors, it’s essential that all these assets load properly. You can use a PDF editor to convert between different file types and keep your formatting correct when working across devices and software programs. Then, go over your website from the perspective of a visitor once you’ve posted your assets to make sure they’re all displaying as they should.
Choose an attractive layout
While your website might have the best content, visitors will only stick around if they like how it looks. It’s essential to apply both time-tested web design principles, and add a unique touch to your site that makes you stand apart from competitors.
When choosing colours, use a colour wheel to make sure that each page is easy on the eye, and aligned with your branding. Your background colours shouldn’t conflict with your text: nobody likes navigating a website with bright yellow text against a white background, for instance. Moreover, you should make sure that there’s sufficient spacing between different elements like text blocks and images. White space is your friend – don’t be afraid to leave sections blank.
Of course, not everyone has the web skills to build a brand new site from scratch, nor budget to hire a designer. In these cases, you can use the popular website templates that WordPress provide. You’ll find many free options that suit your tastes, and most premium templates aren’t too expensive either. Often, you can make small changes to these templates to better suit your brand or personal preferences.
Ensure quick loading speed
Most Internet users are notorious for their short attention spans. If a website takes a while to load, there’s a significant chance that visitors will close the tab and head over to your competitors. In order to make sure they stick around, your pages need to load quickly.
There are several factors that limit loading speed. These include having too many plugins, the amount of traffic currently on your site and the server you’re using. To reduce the time visitors need to wait when clicking on different pages, try moving to a private server, reducing the number of redirects, and limiting how many plugins you have.
When browsing the Internet, people are bombarded by countless options. If a certain website isn’t functioning as well as they expect, they can easily hop onto another. A business site that takes too long to load can cause you to lose out on potential conversions and hamper your potential for growth.
Make your business website easy to navigate
No matter the purpose of your site, you’ll rarely only have a single page. The mark of a well-designed site is that visitors can get around intuitively. Navigability is a crucial aspect of web design that prevents those using your website from growing frustrated and turning to one of your competitors because they can’t find what they need.
When building a business website, we highly recommend including a navigation bar. This part of your site might be a dropdown menu or a static element, but it should clearly show visitors a list of your various pages. To make sure your navigation bar pops off the page, consider making it another colour or using bold text.
No matter how good your content is, visitors won’t extract real value from the site unless they can actually find their way around. Emphasise navigability during the design phase to create an easy, intuitive experience.
Write an ‘about us’ page
In the digital age, websites share many characteristics with storefronts. They’ll likely be the first point of contact a client or customer has with you, and they should tell visitors all they need to know about who you are and what you do.
Visitors will naturally look for this information in your ‘About’ section. While some websites include it in their home pages, many experts recommend a designated ‘About Us’ page. This leaves your homepage free for other content.
The contents of your ‘About Us’ write-up will depend on the website. If you’re running a business where you’re the only employee, this section will naturally be about you. You should include a few key pieces of biographical information and list your most impressive credentials. If your website is for a larger eCommerce business, the ‘About Us’ section should include a brief history of your enterprise, your mission, top values and industry achievements.
Design a Business Website that Represents Your Commitment to Quality
No matter what industry you’re in, a functional, good-looking website is a must. The vast majority of your customers are on the Internet, which means that a poorly designed site can alienate much of your user base and limit the growth potential of your business, beyond the web.
We’ve just gone over some of the most essential design tips to keep in mind when constructing a quality site for your business. Make use of them when building your website to make sure you provide genuine value for anyone who drops by.
