8 Website Best Practices You Should Be Following
Are you proud of your website?
Is it an accurate reflection of you and your business or does it look like a something you'd make fun of…..if it was someone else's website.
How your website looks is just as important as how your actual business looks, maybe even more so since your website likely has a far greater reach than your physical business does. People make snap judgments when they land on a website, within a few seconds someone will know if this is a website they can trust or one that “just doesn't feel right”.
How does your website make people feel? Are the fonts, colors and layout in-line with each other, or at odds with each other? Does it give off a warm fuzzy feeling, or does it make people cringe?
When it comes to a website's design and and structure, consider the following:
- Research by Nielsen Norman Group found that when a website is re-designed with a focus on usability, key business metrics increased by an average of 83%
- A study by the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab found that good, simple, crisp web design increases engagement and credibility.
- The Eyetrack III from Poynter Institute study found that:
- When people look at blurbs (summaries) under headlines on news homepages, they often only look at the left one-third of the blurb. In other words, most people just look at the first couple of words — and only read on if they are engaged by those words.
- People typically scan down a list of headlines, and often don't view entire headlines. If the first words engage them, they seem likely to read on.
You don't have to have a perfect website, but you should have one that gives off a look and feel that accurately reflects your business. A nicely designed website can be the difference between generating leads and losing a potential customer forever. If you haven't created a website for your business yet or it's time for a refresh of your existing one, consider these 8 best practices for creating a great website.
Layout
Don't clutter your website with lots of useless junk. Don't let your homepage look like the inside of a dollar store. Use a simple design with lots of whitespace in between. If something isn't on your website for a good reason, consider removing it or moving it to a back page.
The height of cultivation runs to simplicity ~Bruce Lee
Good
Bad
Colors
Use 2-4 colors that are either shades of each other, or compliment one another. Choose colors that will give off the feeling you want your customers to get when they come to your website. Colors should compliment the messages on your website, not distract from them.
Good
Bad
Navigation
Is your website organized in a logical fashion? Can visitors find what they are looking for without getting frustrated, or do you often leave them at dead ends with nowhere else to go. Some geberal tips for good navigation:
- Use breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are those little line of links you often see at the top of a page showing you where you are on the website, allowing you to backtrack back to towards the homepage without getting lost.
- Make sure visitors can click back to the homepage from any page
- Make sure the categories in your navigation bar make sense. Organize topics and products in a logical order, from the customers point of view.
- Add sitelinks to the footer of your website for additional navigational links. This helps to keep your main navigation bar uncluttered.
- Use short, concise words in your navigation
Good
Bad
Typography
The font, size, spacing and colors of the words on your website are a big deal. People may not be able to point out what's weird on a website, but oftentimes it's the type of font used and the way it's presented on the page. Some general guidelines:
Stick with simple fonts. Fancy fonts makes it harder and more tiring to read text than simple fonts. General rule of thumb, one font for your headlines and sub-headers and one font for your paragraph text. Many people like to use serifs for headlines and sans-serifs for paragraph text.
Make your fonts bigger. Reading on a computer is more tiring than reading a book. If you use the typical small font sizes found in magazines and newspapers, it'll be hard to read anything more than a few lines. Most of the time, bigger is better….many popular websites are using 14-16pt fonts for their paragraph text. Just be sure your line height and spacing are appropriate for your font size.
Use whitespace. Don't jumble your headers and paragraphs together. Leave an appropriate amount of white space to create clean breaks in your text.
Good
Bad
Copy
People don't read websites, they scan them. People typically scan headlines and the first sentences to see if it's worth reading. When it comes to what you want to tell your visitors, get to the point. People don't want to hear about your mission statements, your core values or other things that are important only to you….they want to hear about the things that are important to them. Some general guidelines:
- Make your message short and simple. Get what you want to say across with the least amount of text, using simple language.
- Avoid long paragraphs, they are difficult to read online.
- Use simple and concise headings. Use short, descriptive headlines and headings that will engage people.
- Use headers, bullet points, bold type and whitespace to break up text. Integrate these to make reading easier, to organize your topics, and to bring out key points or sentences you want to highlight.
Good
Bad
About Us
The About Us page is your chance to tell the visitor who you are, why you do what you do, and what makes doing business with you so cool. Often times though, the About Us page turns into a never ending paragraph of why the company is so great, how many awards they won and other nonsense that nobody cares about. Use this page to start making a connection with your visitors and let them know what your really about.
Good
Bad
Images
Two hands shaking, an arrow pointing upwards into blue skies, the perfect multicultural mix of young, good looking professionals…..the possibilities of stock photography are endless. Don't use them. People are past those cliche' stock images and they do nothing for your website or your business.
Find someone with a good quality camera and who knows a thing or two about photography and have them create your images. People want to see real images of your business and the people who work there and images of your products or service in action. Will it be as clean and polished as stock photography? No……but it'll be real, and that's what people are looking for.
Good
Bad
Contact Us
- Whatever form of contact you use on your website, make it easy for people to find it and easy to use it. Some general tips:
- Put your contact info front and center on your website, not buried in the footer.
- Use a contact form instead of adding your email address. With an email address, people either have to copy and paste it or they click on it and get the “email setup configuration wizard” on their computer that they never knew existed….and have no idea how to use.
- Use a simple contact form, only ask for enough information that's necessary….too many businesses try and use their contact form as a prospecting tool
Good
Bad
Whether you hire someone to build your website or you attempt to do it yourself, following the suggestions above will give you a guideline for creating a nice website you can be proud of.
Gary
Latest posts by Gary (see all)
- Top Local SEO Strategies for Flooring Companies: Building Reputation and Driving Traffic - October 31, 2024
- How To Conduct a Competitor Analysis for Local SEO - December 11, 2023
- The Ultimate Guide to On-Page SEO: Optimize Your Webpages Like a Pro - October 15, 2023
Comments are closed.