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.

Business Website Statistics

Website statistics are misunderstood by many business owners. It’s essential that you understand a few things your web statistics program is telling you. I’ll go over a few things here and then if you’re still interested in learning more you can sign up for one of our elearning courses where I’ll cover quite a bit more on website statistics. (in a couple months – writing courses now).

Website statistics and what they mean. I use Google’s Analytics and Godaddy statistics for all of my sites and they give me two different pictures of the same thing. No two stats programs ever seem to match up. Godaddy.com stats are enabled in your Godaddy hosting control panel using the “enable statistics” icon. Once enabled you can see your stats by using your hosting login and password when asked after going to: http://www.yoursite.com/stats/

Godaddy’s stats are pretty basic, yet they give part of the picture.

What I count on though is Google Analytics. This requires a bit of code on each page of your site and is very accurate. They tell a lot more about your site than does Godaddy, and it’s also free to use.

Here are some basic business website (or personal) statistics terms and what they really mean:

Bounce Rate – This tells you that, of the total number of visitors that come to your site – this percentage bounce right back off – like they jumped on the moon and sprung away with no gravity. If your bounce rate is over 60% or so – that’s getting high. Some business websites have 75% bounce rate. Some have more and some have 25%. Bounce rate is a function of  a lot of different things… the design of your business site and how well Google, another search engine – or another website is qualifying what the surfer wants when he/she arrives at your business site.

Hits – Hits means nothing. Please don’t even look at hits. It could literally mean anything, depending on your stats package. Instead, look at unique visitors and pageviews or unique pageviews.

Unique visitors – the number of unique people that visited your site. This is not 100% infallible as you will have multiple visitors that used different computers to come to your site.

Pageviews – the number of times your page was shown to a visitor – this is after the bounce rate is taken into account. Godaddy shows before the bounce rate is taken into account. So, for example… At Godaddy one of our sites gets 3700 pageviews per day. Google shows only about 1000 per day.

Contrary to some opinion, you don’t need thousands of people per day at your site to make money with your online business or business website. If you had 100 well-targeted visitors arrive at your site everyday that could be enough. Try hard to convert visitors to join your email list by offering something for free in exchange for them joining your list. You’ll have continued opportunities to promote ideas, conversation and things you’re selling if you’re able to email them over time.

3 Great Business Website WordPress Theme Designers

More and more businesses are creating their web presence using the WordPress content management system because it’s:

• Fast
• Easy
• Already optimized for Google and other Search Engines (to a high degree)
• Easy to choose any of 1000′s of themes to fit your business or change at will
• Free

WordPress itself is free and most of the themes are free. Lately there are some amazing themes coming out that the designers are charging a nominal fee for – just $70 in most cases. In some cases, like at WooThemes – you can get 2 for 1 on their themes. I found 2 themes that I like a great deal from them and I’ll get them both for $70 this weekend when I purchase them using PayPal.

I started to make the title of this article – “5 Great Business Website WordPress Themes” but as I was about to get started writing down the top 5 I realized there are about 100 premium themes I’m aware of that are just great for business. So, I changed the name of this article to the 3 great designers of business WordPress themes because there are 3 designers that are just head and shoulders above the rest.

Top 3 Business Website WordPress Designers:

1. Brian Gardner. Brian started with Revolution themes that were ahead of their time, well designed, and he offered great support through a forum that had some other designers as helpers. Now Brian has moved on to phase II of his WordPress themes and has a whole new group of awesome photos – some of which are focused on specific businesses like Real Estate for one.

See Brian’s themes here > http://www.studiopress.com/themes

2. WooThemes. Woothemes was put together by a bunch of guys from all over the globe. They all create themes that fit with the WooTheme idea and they have some amazing themes.

See WooThemes here > http://www.woothemes.com/themes/

3. Thesis. As far as I know this designer has this one major theme and it’s unbelievable. It’s made primarily for business owners that don’t know how to code behind the scenes changes in WordPress – which requires CSS and php knowledge. Now you don’t need that at all – there are probably over 100 changes anyone can do on the easy options pages included with this theme. Probably the easiest way to get started using WordPress. I highly recommend this. I didn’t mention the designer’s name because he doesn’t list his name on the site – why? Anybody’s guess – he or she doesn’t really understand how to best market a product me thinks! YOU are part of the brand!

Anyway, see Thesis here > http://diythemes.com/thesis/