Category Archives: Website Design

Usability, Website Design

Homepages Should Point Visitors in the Right Direction

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Having an effective homepage is one of the best practices for your business’s website. A homepage serves as the front door of your website. You should design your homepage to feature the visitor’s most requested information and services and to serve as a top-level directory to access the primary sections of your website.

Why Homepages are Important

  • The homepage is the main tool for sending your visitors in the right direction.
  • Web sites need to focus on helping the visitors find the content and information they search for and need most.
  • Studies shows that more than half of all web users evaluate websites based on homepages alone. If you have an ineffective homepage, many visitors will immediately be turned off and may never come back to your site.
  • Web visitors want fast, efficient service. On homepages, they expect to find what they’re looking for quickly.
  • Web users are impatient. They don’t want to be distracted by text or graphics that don’t help them find what they want or that increase download time.
  • Even if your website is targeted to specialized audiences (for example ), your homepage needs to communicate basic information to the the general audience.

The homepage is different from all other web site pages. A well-constructed homepage will project a good first impression to all who visit the site.It is important to ensure that the homepage has all of the features expected of a homepage and looks like a homepage to users. A homepage should clearly communicate the site’s purpose, and show all major options available on the web site.

The homepage serves as your website’s starting point. If visitors feel lost or disoriented visitors they can always return to the homepage and start over. This makes it important to provide a link back to your homepage on every page of your website.

Small Business, Website Design

Do It Myself or Hire a Web Designer

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Nowadays creating a website is relatively simple. Do it yourself software comes with hosting packages from large companies like Yahoo! and GoDaddy. However, there is so much more to a well designed website than using an out-of-the-box template.

Web design requires knowledge in graphic communications, page optimization to make it easy to be read by search engines and utilizing best practices in usability and user experience.

I’ve listed the usual reasons that I’ve heard from clients:

  1. Save Money. On the surface your site may appear to cost you less if you decide to design it yourself. However, one or two mistakes could cost you in the long run. If your site doesn’t perform you could loose out on potential clients or lost sales costing you much more than the cost of the site.
  2. More Control. By designing the site yourself it is true you have control over the design. Be prepared, however, if you are using an online site builder to give up some control due to limitations of the WYSIWYG tools.
  3. You Know Best. It would be expected that you know your business better than anyone else. The question is do you understand what your website visitors are looking for? Do you their navigation patterns and how they are searching for information? If not, you may be building your site for yourself and not your visitors.

As you should start to see building a website requires quite a lot of considerations.

Now, let’s look at the benefits of hiring a professional website designer.

  1. High Quality. You will get a high quality designed website that will communicate your company’s story.
  2. One of Kind. A professional designer will design a one of kind website that will not only meet your business needs but also the needs of your visitors.
  3. Easy to Use. By hiring a professional designer your website should be easy to use and simple to navigate. Having an easy to use site will enable visitors to find the answers to their questions or the products they are in search of.
  4. SEO Benefits. A professional designer should build your site using web design standards that will help gain organic search engine traffic.
  5. Build Trust. A professionally designed website will help establish trust into your products and services. If your website looks amateurish so will your company, products and services
  6. Competitive Advantage. A professional website designer will be able to design a site that stands out from your competition giving you an advantage.
  7. Focus on Your Business. Hiring a professional designer enables you to focus onyour day to day business. It is one less thing you need to worry about doing yourself.

This is only a short list of the benefits or hiring a professional website designer.

Website design is something that requires numerous skills such as design, information architecture, marketing and SEO. Hiring a professional designer may cost more upfront but the benefits to your business in sales or customers certainly outweigh these initial costs.

Small Business, Usability, Website Design

How Design Affects Your Website Visitors

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The design of your website will greatly how visitors use your website. Confusion will cause your visitors to leave resulting in lost engagement or lost sales.

You have a golden opportunity with every visitor that comes to your website. To capitalize on each and every opportunity take a critical look at your website and ask yourself some key questions.

Is it easy for visitors to navigate your site? The navigation on your site should clearly indicate to your visitors where they are, what they can do and where they can go.

If you are registering users or taking online orders is your process smooth and logical? Gather only the most needed information. This should only be the information needed to complete the transaction. For example, don’t ask for my birthday just so you have it. Reduce ‘friction points’ – the fewer the better.

Is critical information not being seen by your visitors? Jacob Nielsen is a leading authority on website usability and recently reported that visitors are conditioned to overlook information that looks too much like banner advertising. Over-designing the textual information on your website will cause visitors to ignore it. Be considerate about how you’re designing your information.

Does your site speak in jargon and buzzwords? Visitors do not have the time or desire to learn your business lingo. Make it a point to write in terms your visitors are familiar with. The language should be simple to understand.

Are you consistent throughout the site? Consistency is important to eliminate user confusion. The terminology being used to describe a process, for example, should remain the same throughout the site. When linking to a page make sure the link and the title of the page being linked to match. The same color and style should be used for all text links.

Does your site design provide clarity? While the design of your website is important it shouldn’t get in the way of completing a task. Keep your site clean and reduce the amount of visual clutter. Make use of white space to break up information and provide your visitors with visual resting places.

By thoroughly looking at your website and asking critical questions you can greatly affect your visitors experience with your website.

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, Usability, User Experience, Website Design

15 Tips for a More User Friendly Website

Visitors tend to only scan your website’s rather than spending a large amount of time thoroughly understanding the site. As such it is of utmost importance to make your message and options clear. Failing to do so will leave your visitors lost, confused and frustrated. Any of these options will end the same way – a missed opportunity and little chance of a repeat visit.

15 simple tips for a more usable website

  1. The home page should clearly tell your visitor what the site is about
  2. Make sure each page of your website has purpose
  3. Organize content so that headings are in hierarchical order to give clear structure to the copy.
  4. Don’t make your visitors guess about your navigation make the links obvious
  5. Use consistent and meaningful terminology for navigation items and hypertext links (read loose the “cutesy names”)
  6. Restrict the navigation bar to a manageable number of links or buttons
  7. Clearly indicate what your next steps are for your visitors
  8. Remove any clutter that may distract your visitor from the appropriate next steps
  9. Don’t change interactions through-out your site stick with what works
  10. Make it easy to find information such as contact details, pricing and delivery charges
  11. Contently review your site for errors that will make your site look unprofessional
  12. Make sure you text is large enough to be readable (at least 10px, 72% or .75em)
  13. Use a font easily read online (Verdana, Georgia, Arial or Times New Roman ) for your body text
  14. Do not underline any text that is not a link
  15. Include ample white space in the page layout

The more user friendly your website is, the greater the chance of converting your visitor into either a prospect, customer or both.

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?

User Experience, Website Design

User Interface Research

I came across this interesting class project for the Advanced Interface Design Class at the Art Institute of Atlanta.

The ten question survey collects your answers and then shows the cumulative results for over 30,000 other users who have also went through and answered these questions. The stated goal of studying design elements is to help “build better websites.” The data is interesting but personally, I’m not sure of the value.

Try it yourself.