Category Archives: Small Business

Small Business, Website Design

Design Your Website to Attract Customers

A critical component of any website is the “look and feel.” Too many sites fail to put enough focus on the design of their website.

Why All the Fuss

You may be asking yourself, why should so much focus be placed on the design of my site? This is a valid question – one that needs to be understood if you want your site to be competitive.

Think about the design of your site as you would think about the design of your storefront. Would you want your store to look like it was designed in a weekend? Mismatching furnishings, streaking paint, poor lighting and flooring that is uneven causing your visitors to trip and fall? Probably not. The design of your store (your showroom) is a reflection business, your products and most importantly your brand. Your website is your 24 hour, always open, always ready to impress showroom.

The look of your website should be consistent with the overall look of your brand, your storefront and other marketing and collateral materials

Tell Me a Story

Challenge yourself or your designer to create a story for your site. Visually communicate the story of your company, your services, or the products you sell. Visual stories will set you apart from your competition by wrapping the information your users are seeking in an engaging user experience. Stories are a core component in communication, tapping into this can give you an advantage.

An important consideration when designing your site is the use of color, photos and typography. When designing your site, realize that everything you put onto the page has an effect on the users’ perception of your company.

The biggest challenge when designing a website is to create a story while at the same time creating a simple and easy to use site. A clean and simple site will enable users to find their information quickly and make understanding information easier.

Rely on the foundation that you have already in established to help create an easy means of navigation.

An important point to remember is that you may have the most beautifully designed site that weaves a brilliant story but if a user cannot find what it is they are looking for they will leave your and find the information elsewhere.

Conclusion

Your website is one of the best investments your business can make. For the success of your site it will need to have a solid design that is capable of telling your story, a look consistent with your overall brand strategy and most importantly an easy means of navigation.

If you are not confident in your ability to carry out these tasks yourself it would be in your best interest to hire a web site designer to create the look and feel of your site.

You owe it to your business to create a professional looking website.

Small Business, User Experience, Website Design

Organizing Your Website’s Navigation

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Outlining your web site’s structure early in the design process will help facilitate a good navigational structure allowing the visitors to your web site an easy easy to find they are looking for. A consistent complaint coming from website visitors is how difficult it is to find the information they want. By thinking through your navigation and structure upfront you will gain a benefit when trying to update your site in the future.

Understanding your content

Look at the content you have available to use on your website. This may sound obvious but it is surprisingly overlooked. If you have a site currently, start there. Also take a look through your marketing materials, brochures, articles, product descriptions, etc. Once you have an understanding of the information you have available start creating logical buckets, or groupings of the information.

You may find it necessary to create buckets within buckets (sub-directories) in order to organize your content appropriately. For example a photography site may have a bucket that contains examples of all the types of photography the company does. A grouping like this would work but it would quickly become very large and overwhelming. But what if the photography bucket was broken down into smaller groupings such as portrait, black and white, wedding, baby, pets, etc.? By creating smaller groupings the user can quickly and easily narrow down the scope of photography and identify the type that pertains most to what they were looking for.

Once the content has been identified and grouped appropriately you should now be able to label each of the buckets (including any sub-bucket that was created).This will serve as your primary and possible secondary navigation.

Placement of Primary Navigation

Now that the content has been identified, grouped and labeled in a way that logically makes sense to the end user it is important to think about how and where the site navigation will be placed.

By-and-large there are two primary locations for website navigation; across the top or down the left side of the page. Large sites, such as e-commerce sites, use a combination of the two. As the size of your website grows so should your navigation system.

Some sites (this one included) run navigation down the right. This by no means is wrong it just isn’t as common as across the top or down the left. Interesting to note however, is with the proliferation of blogging navigation appearing on the right is becoming more popular.

As with everything there are going to be trade-offs with each type of navigation structure. Listed below are some of the basics of each.

  • Tabs Across the Top
    Located near the top of the page visitors are quickly able to view the most important buckets (primary navigation) of your site. The biggest downside of using tabs is limited amount of space available. The size of the labels combined with the size of the tabs themselves will limit the number of tabs that you will be able to fit without causing horizontal scrolling, a usability faux paux.

    Focus on the main buckets as doorways into your site.

  • Left Rail
    This navigation runs down the left side of your site. Left navigation allows you to show more options than what top navigation does. Showing the main buckets as well as sub-buckets will help users orient themselves with your site and the breadth of offerings.

    E-commerce sites are good examples of sites that use left navigation well. Since there is typically a lot of different types of products available using the left navigation to better organize them helps users quickly to locate what they are after.

Other navigational systems should be considered when your site begins growing larger than a handful of pages (usually 15 pages or more).

  • On-Site Search
    Providing an on-site search is a good way to supplement your primary navigation system. With a few exceptions on-site searches should never be used as a primary navigational system. Again, e-commerce sites tend to do on-site search well.
  • Footer Links
    Footer links, as indicated by the name, run in the footer of your site and provide an additional means for users to navigate your site. As with an on-site search footer links should never be used as a primary navigational system.

    An added benefit of providing footer links is from SEO standpoint. Most likely footer links are text based (not always the case with tabs) allowing search engine spiders to easily read and follow these links.

  • Site Maps
    Site maps provide the overall website structure. Think of the site map as an outline for the information contained within your site.

    Site maps again provide an SEO benefit by bubbling up links to all the pages of your website.

Conclusion

When designing or re-designing your website it is extremely important to lay the foundation upon which your site can be built. This foundation will help guide you in determining your navigational system and your primary and secondary buckets.

Finally, by having a well organized and well structured site you will ease your users’ frustrations and create a user friendly site that helps them find what they are looking for.

Small Business, User Experience, Website Design

27 Simple Ways to Build Trust in Your Website

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Building trust online isn’t achieved by any one single action. Trust is achieved by doing many little things correctly throughout your website. When combined, these will give your visitors a sense of trust, honesty, and stability. The good news is it is easy to create and build trust in your online visitors.

Few business owners focus on building trust in the minds of their visitors. When done well, the trust you build becomes a sustainable competitive advantage.

  1. Make a good first impression with the design of your site. Having a site that looks professional says a whole lot about your company.
  2. Create simple and intuitive navigation. If visitors are not able to find what they are looking for easily, doubt will begin to form about your ability to provide what they want.
  3. Give your website a voice that is consistent with your company’s brand. Make sure to use language that is audience appropriate.
  4. Make it easy for your visitors to contact you. Provide an email form, telephone number, and address of the company.
  5. Answer any incoming emails promptly. Try and answer all emails within 24 hours no more than 48 hours after receiving.
  6. Continue to add content and update your site regularly. This shows that your website is active and a focal point for your business.
  7. Make a routine to check all your website links. Broken links will cause doubts to quickly form in your visitors’ minds.
  8. Spelling and the correct use grammar matter. Typos create the impression of sloppiness and carelessness.
  9. Do not make outrageous claims. Your visitors are too smart and will associate your website with those of the get-rich schemes.
  10. Do not fake your testimonials. Publish real testimonials and always use real names and link to websites where possible.
  11. Write your ‘About Us’ page to be personal and comprehensive. It is important to make visitors feel comfortable and show the real people behind the site.
  12. Add your picture and the pictures of any key people involved with your company. This reinforces the fact that there are real people behind the site.
  13. Carefully consider any advertising you display on your site. If your website is anything but a blog, I strongly discourage any use of advertising.
  14. If you are conducting any transactions over your website make sure you publish a security policy. Clearly indicate what measures you take to ensure that all transactions are secure.
  15. If you offer a guarantee make sure it highly visible. If you don’t offer a guarantee I’d suggest you offering one, making it a 100% money-back guarantee if possible.
  16. If you display pricing keep your prices up to date, and honor those prices. If unexpected costs do arise, a customer will be much more likely to accept them if a foundation of trust is built.
  17. Do not hide charges from your visitors. Make sure they know what to expect in terms of shipping and handling charges.
  18. Make your refund and returns policy visible. Do not bury it, use it as a competitive advantage.
  19. Use the trust of big brand names and companies to piggyback off of. For example if you use PayPal, put the PayPal logo on your site.
  20. Become a member of well-known industry associations for your subject, join up and put their logos on your site. Join your local area Chamber of Commerce and put their logo on your website.
  21. Allow visitors to add comments to your articles. Openness and the exchange of views build community and a sense of involvement.
  22. If you accept credit cards put images of the credit cards you accept on every page of the order process.
  23. Clearly indicate ‘secure website’ whenever you try to get any information from visitors, including newsletter sign-ups, forum input and payment.
  24. Offer a low-cost, entry-level option when selling a service such as a subscription. This could be a one-day, one week or a month trial offer.
  25. If you do offer a trial make it extremely easy to cancel the offer. Do not try and trap your visitors.
  26. Use a high level of security when processing credit cards. Make your visitors aware of all the steps you are taking.
  27. Only ask your visitors for information that you really need. For example, for an email newsletter sign-up, only ask for an email address, nothing else is necessary.

Building and gaining trust with your visitors mostly comes down to common sense and good business practices. You can never do too much to build trust. Continually learn what makes a site trustworthy or untrustworthy and implement the relevant changes to your site.

Small Business, Usability, User Experience, Website Design

Quick Fixes to Simplify Your Website

Simple website design focuses on a visitor experiences your company’s website. By creating a goal oriented website you will get your visitors to the information they want quickly and easily.

Listed below is a short list of simple fixes to increase the clarity and ease of use for your company’s website.

  • Gather only task critical information. Asking for information that you don’t immediately need, even if the fields are optional, will make the form look at a long and decrease completion rates.
  • Don’t ask for information that won’t use. Example: Fax numbers – Seriously, when was the last time you actually faxed anything?
  • Use bullet points to clarify information and facilitate the visitors’ inclination to scan.
  • Create clear and understandable links – leave the marketing fluff at home.
  • Simplify your checkout process. Your visitors have close to a decade of online experience they don’t need an explanation of how to pay online.
Design, Logo Design, Small Business, Website Design

9 Benefits of Taking Design Seriously

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Taking design seriously can help your small business stand out and be memorable when the competition for your customers attention is ever increasing.

“Business people need to develop a better understanding of design, form partnerships between themselves and creativity, and apply strategy to design thinking, in order to compete effectively today.” -Fast Company

9 Benefits of Quality Design

  • Create a good first impression
  • Quickly illustrate the quality of your company, products and/or services
  • Gain instant credibility
  • Establish a level of trust between your company and customers
  • Simplify communication
  • Increase usability
  • Increase customer engagement
  • Differentiate your company from your competition
  • Increase readability, scan-ability and legibility

Having a well designed branding materials, such as your website and logo tell your customers a lot about your company, your products or your services. A good designer can make a tremendous difference to your company’s image as well as your overall business.

How do you view design?

Design, Small Business

Why Design is Important for Small Business

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Simply put, design is a means for your business to communicate its value in a way that stands out and grabs peoples’ attention.

“I believe that in a crowded marketplace, design is the most potent tool for differentiating one’s products or services.” Tom Peters, Management Consultant

Your company is not alone. You have competitors, we all do. Design will help you deliver a message that differentiates your products or services from your competitors.

Perception is ultimately reality and you must show your value immediately to your customers. The effort placed into creating the design of your website, logo, business cards, etc. will be seen as soon as your customer interacts with anyone of these. This initial impression with your company will begin to formulate your customers perceived value of your company, products and/or services.

The primary purpose of design is to deliver a message. Whether you message is buy more widgets, or call to schedule an appointment, design puts organization and order into that message so that it is delivered to your customers in a way that makes sense, and is appealing to them.

Design plays a critical role in making information easy to understand and use. Anything from a website that makes ordering a pair of shoes easy to a business card that clearly indicates who you are and how best to contact you, good design streamline this process.

So, you can see design is important for your business. Design is how customers see your company. Perception is reality.

Small Business, Website Design

Does My Small Business Need a Website

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Why does my business really need a website? My customers are all local I don’t see the value in a website. How can it possibly help me?

This is a common question that comes up time and time again for many small business owners who have only local customers. Instead of asking if you need a website ask yourself “Would my business benefit from exposure 24-hours 7 days a week, 365 days a year?” The answer should now be a little clearer. No other medium allows you to expose all the benefits of your small business to your target market at their convenience and provide a source of direct communications from them to you?

Any business that is currently in the yellow pages should also be online. And any business that isn’t currently in the yellow pages should consider going online first before the yellow pages. The internet is where your customers expect to find you. The internet is where your customers are.

Having a website allows your potential customers to gather the information they need from their own computer monitors. Are there questions your potential customers ask daily? Are there typical items that help sell your products or services, a list of features, or a bulleted list of services? This is the information that needs to be available 24/7 on your site.

Customers prefer to gather information anonymously. They simply like to gather information before they put themselves in a position where they’ll likely be asked to answer questions. The majority of your customers prefer to know what they’re coming to buy before they walk in your door and will appreciate an informative site that functions as an expert salesperson during all those hours you’re not open for business.

Think about how many times you have used a search engine within the past week to research a product or service that you were considering purchasing. The benefits of a website are innumerable.

Small Business, Website Design

Professionally Designed Websites Matter

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Have you ever found yourself searching for something online and came across a site that just didn’t leave you with a good impression? You know the kind, hard navigate, not very visually pleasing, maybe be a bit shady looking. If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation did you stay on the site or leave only to continue your search?

More than likely you left and kept searching. A 2002 Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility study shows that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone.

Having a website is a reflection on your company. If your site looks horrible this will reflect onto your products and/or services, in turn visitors will assume that your products and/or services are horrible.

As the old adage goes, “You may never get a second chance to make a good first impression.” This is even more important with your website. The impression made on your visitors will greatly determine whether or not that visitor becomes a customer. Having a professionally designed website might mean the difference between just another visitor and a qualified lead.

Any designer can design a website. Finding a designer that understands how to align your business goals with usability best practices and design theory is where the true talent comes in.

Having a professionally designed website really does matter and is well worth the investment.

Small Business, User Experience, Website Design

Know Why Your Customer Will Use Your Website

Understanding why a customer will come to your website is the first step to building a meaningful website.

In working with many clients over the years, I’ve seen the only initial goal of a website to create a “Wow” factor. This being an attempt to impress their customers and gain a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, this rarely works as planned. And often times leads to frustration from both the client and the designer each trying to seek the elusive “Wow.”

A better approach is to know why your customer is coming to your website in the first place. Example questions you should ask yourself:

  • What benefit can a website provide my customers?
  • Will customers have questions that could be answered online?
  • What are my customers’ needs?
  • Are customers looking for a way to contact me?
  • Are customers researching products or services before making a decision?
  • Will customers go online to compare my company against my competitors?
  • Will customers look online for samlpes of work?
  • Can my website extend the offline, in store, experience?

Understanding your customers is only one step to a great website. But if done correctly could be a website with the “Wow” factor.