5 Important Web Design Practices for Small Business Websites

Keeping your web design in alignment with your brand is a no small feat. You see, when people get in touch with you in the business world, what they see is often what they come to know about your brand. The speed at which your website loads will be interpreted as the efficiency of your business, while sleek visuals might contribute to the image of your company, as a whole.

Moreover, you need to understand that whatever you do with your digital marketing, the landing page is both the first and the last line of defense. Think about it, everything you do always leads back to your website. For these reasons and many more, it’s vital that you find the most efficient web design practices for your small business website. Here are five that you should seriously consider.

Start with loading time

It’s already a well-known fact that an average human being has a shorter attention span than an average goldfish. No, this is not a phrase and things are getting worse by the minute. Since the year 2000, the average human attention span has fallen from 12 to only 8 seconds. This is why you have only 8 seconds to convince your audience to stay on your website. Now, imagine how much harder this gets if your page takes 4 seconds or more to load. We’re not just talking about the frustration but the loss of patience that will make 25 percent of your entire audience leave if the website fails to load within four seconds.

It’s also incredibly important that you realize that the tolerance level across devices isn’t that great. Sure, more than half of internet users expect the computer to be slightly faster, with only 11 percent who expect this difference to be noticeable. So, not only does your response time have to be fast, it has to be fast, responsive and consistent across all devices. In term of the ROI, there’s an estimate that a single second of improvement may bring an increase of $7,000 per day, in a scenario where your company daily makes $100,000. We’re talking about the 7 percent increase on a daily basis.

Simple navigation benefits everyone

The next thing you need to focus on is the navigation of your website. Here, you need to realize that simplified navigation doesn’t only help users get their way around your website but the crawlers, as well. This means that your website will get indexed much faster, which should be a massive SEO boost for your business. Still, DIY designers often rely on robot exclusion (noindex), which can be quite dangerous and, after a simple mistake, block the entirety of your content from these googlebots. This reason alone is why outsourcing website design to veterans like Hopping Mad websites is a good idea. Needless to say, this can help you get a visually pleasing website that’s functional, at the same time.

Appropriate investment

In theory, the money that you invest in your website is supposed to return, however, there’s also such a thing as too much investment. For instance, previously, we’ve discussed a scenario where your website returns $100,000 per day. Nonetheless, this is quite far down the line. At the moment, you need to ensure that your investment matches the size of your business, as well as your marketing budget. Therefore, answering the question of how much money is it worth to invest mostly depends on the size of your operations. Also, improving or fixing your website doesn’t cost the same as building it from scratch, which is also something you need to consider.

Being customer-centric

While being your own and developing a design that you alone like is great, it’s more important that you find a way to appeal to the customer. Therefore, you need to build a customer-centric design and make your entire brand customer-centric. This is one of the most important messages of Jeff Bezos, the founder of the Amazon.com and the richest man in the world. To achieve this, you need to concentrate on visibility, provide instant feedback (especially when transactions are in question) and make the website pleasant to interact with.

Incorporate video

At the end of the day, it’s incredibly important for your website to have videos for more than several reasons. First, by most metrics, it’s the preferred method of consuming content by your audience. Second, it enhances the overall website experience and, finally, it drastically benefits your inbound marketing strategy. Think about it, since last year, there are mandatory three videos displayed for each search. For someone who is already working hard to get displayed in Google Rich Answers or get a snippet, this might be the next best thing. In other words, you get a chance to reach the top of the search results once again.

While some of the above-listed practices are there to make your life easier, others are there to keep you in check or show you the way. As for the methodology used, let’s just say that you can achieve the one and the same thing through several different means. Sure, the list doesn’t end here and trends like mobile friendliness, SEO and email marketing also have their role in this field. Nonetheless, the above-listed five should most likely be at the center of your efforts.