The Dos and Don’ts of Web Design: A Guide for Small Businesses No ratings yet.

Websites are always the best way to build trust among your audience and grow rapidly. Whether you are a small business or a giant corporation that is known by everyone, you still need an awesome website for your business. The best websites are built by following web design principles and guidelines.

If you are new to building websites and just starting out, this is the perfect place for you. In this article, we will discuss some do’s and don’ts of web design that can make your website design better and more useful. So let’s get started.

Dos of Web Design

1. Provide Similar Experience Across Devices

The best websites care for their user’s experience, and they design websites that are similar across devices. Today, a large portion of internet traffic originates from devices like mobile phones and tablets. Hence, it is important that you provide a similar experience across devices. This can be achieved by adopting responsive design and even hiding/showing elements based on devices for ease of use.

1. Highlight Visited Links

Links play a vital role in navigating across pages, and they can also help the user understand where they are on the website by just looking at the links. To make things easier to understand, you should highlight visited links on the website with different colors so users can understand which pages they have already visited and avoid mistakenly visiting the same pages multiple times.

1. Make it Easy to Scan Your Pages

Being a small business, you will have a lot of first-time visitors on your websites, and to serve them better, your pages should be easy to scan. A new visitor will not read everything about your product/service on the page. Rather, they’ll scan the page and quickly decide whether it is worth their time.

Hence, it is important that you design web pages in a way that anyone can get vital information by quickly scanning it. Explore the UI/UX design visual hierarchy and position your elements correctly to get the best results.

1. Verify All Links are Working

One of the most frustrating things that can happen when visiting a website is that a link you click does not work and is broken. This can leave a bad impression on the visitors, and many times, they may abandon the website completely. Hence, before adding links, you should ensure that they are working, and redirect to the desired pages.

Moreover, there should be a periodic check for all your links, and during that time, you should verify the condition of all links and whether they are working as expected or not. This will help you find and fix broken links before they can make an impact on the user experience.

1. Have a Strong Call To Action

The main motive of any small business website is to help grow the business and provide cues to the visitors to make any purchase on the website. In web design, this is often called a call to action, which tells the visitors what they should do when they reach a certain section of the webpage.

Many people don’t focus on this aspect and think their designs aren’t good or they don’t have enough traffic to make sales. Call to action is important in web design and the drivers of your growth. When designing your websites, always focus on creating unique and clear call-to-action sentences that make an impression on the visitor. Such a call to action can increase your sales and help you gain more visitors to the website.

1. Design Easy Navigation

Having an easy navigation structure makes a big impact. Website visitors don’t like to be puzzled when visiting websites due to complex navigation. The sole purpose of having navigation is to make the website easier to use, and you should not overlook this.

When doing web design or seo strategies for small business websites, focus on designing easy navigation that highlights the core products or services of the business and allows easier jumping between web pages. Moreover, your navigation should be consistent across all pages, and it should allow the visitor to reach any page from anywhere on the website.

Knowing what you should do while designing websites for your website is also important, as it is important to know the things you should avoid doing that can negatively impact your design efforts.

Don’ts of Web Design

1. Make slow-loading websites

With fast internet connections and better devices, no one likes to wait for a website to wait. So, one of the worst things you can do for your website design is to make it slow by loading a lot of content simultaneously. Slow-loading websites don’t generate lots of sales, and they can negatively affect your business growth.

When visitors have to wait more than 10 seconds for your website to load, they are likely to abandon the website and jump to some other website that can load faster. According to a survey, the probability of bounce back rate increases by 32% as the page loading time takes 1 sec to 3 secs. Slow-loading websites have a higher bounce rate, and this can also affect other website metrics.

1. Overdo Promotions

Promoting your products on the website is always better than spending more on advertisements across different platforms. But it is only good if done in moderation; otherwise, your visitors will be tired of constant promotions.

Moreover, overdoing promotions will also make it bad for other content on the page. This happens as people tend to look away from promotions or ads, and in that they can also miss out on important content items. Hence, keep a check on the number of ads and promotions you do on your website, and give visitors an option to remove them if they are placed in distracting places.

1. Overtake Scrolling Behaviour

Web users are well-versed in the default scrolling behavior on the web and expect each website to comply with the same scrolling behavior. Overtaking the default scrolling behavior on the website and doing something different can quickly backfire on your designs.

Your visitors will need to understand your scrolling behavior before taking any step, and till then, they will be confused. Moreover, this also takes control of the visitors on how they want to browse the website. Hence, it is better to keep the default scrolling behavior for your website and make changes at other points of the design.

1. Auto-playing Videos

Auto-playing videos take unnecessary network bandwidth, and they make the website load slower. Apart from that, many people consider auto-playing videos on websites annoying. Moreover, you never know where the person is, and auto-playing videos can cause embarrassment or discomfort when the user is just browsing, and it starts playing at full volume.

It is one of the bad design elements, and you should also think of removing it from your web design.

1. Sacrifice Usability

No matter how good a design or element looks on your website, it should not compromise the usability. Being a small business, you have fewer chances of impressing your visitors, and you should not give it away due to usability. You should never sacrifice the usability of your website to make it feature-loaded. Always remember that simplicity will win over shiny yet unusable websites.

Final Thoughts

As you know the things you should do and the things to avoid while designing your website, you are all set up to start working on your new website and roll it out to the visitors. Keep the above-discussed points in mind, and you can leverage your website to grow your small business. Take the First Step Toward Better Rankings – Contact Us Now !