10 Design Tips for Your Business Website

These are some business website design tips that you can use to make your site easy to use for visitors. These are things we have been doing for a number of years – so, these are book ideas – but also tested and true techniques to help your business website be the best it can be.

1. Use Arial, Trebuchet MS, Helvetica, Verdana or similar fonts. Use 12 pt font for general articles – as your basic font size. Some major sites use 14 pt. At 10 pt it’s a bit hard to see on some monitors and with some font types so best to stick with size 12 pt. We use 12 pt font for our basic text.

2. A site with no images is a boring site and is quickly clicked away from. Include photos. Ideally, include photos of people if they fit your business site.

3. Include video, PDF, images, MP3, FLASH, and any kind of multimedia files to spice up your business website. Interactivity makes for sticky pages and visitors to your business site stick around longer.

4. Hyperlinks on your business website should be blue. Ideally your hyperlinks should be blue. They should be uniform across the site – the color should always be the same. If you choose a color other than blue make sure the color is unique on the site – meaning, that color is only used for links – not for general text.

5. White space is…  nice.

6. A sales page for your product or service should contain text, photos, and videos to show the item / service from all possible angles and to highlight it’s best features. Ideally you’ll show a person interacting with the item.

7. Header, footer, column structure should remain the same throughout your business site. Uniform design is important and makes surfers on your business site comfortable knowing their way around in a short time. Repeating the header’s links in the footer helps visitors quickly find what they’re looking for as they get to the bottom of pages. The duplicate links for your important pages don’t hurt in the search engines either.

8. Don’t autoload videos or large files on pages visitors open. Offer the option to download or start video – don’t auto-play it. Don’t auto-play sounds that scare the visitor, that’s a great way to lose them. As cool as you think it is – it probably isn’t.

9. A business website (or any site) of 10 pages isn’t taken very seriously by Google, Yahoo and other search engines unless there are a LOT of links to that site. Typical business websites should be more than 20 pages. Every one of our 30+ websites have 55 pages or more – which is really, more like what a serious business website should be.

10. Have graphics professionally designed. Most people (including us) cannot seem to make outstanding graphics time after time. Sometimes we get lucky, but usually not. It’s almost always best to outsource graphics design for your business website.