Designing for your website

As your business and changes improves, so should your website. Even though website design is so highly spoken of, in fact only the minority of small businesses actively work on their design, and maintaining it to always keep a fresh look. Website design is crucial in marketing your brand, products and services. This is especially important because people rely so highly on online research.

The #1 rule of website design: make the design reflect your business

Yes, it’s as simple as that, you can easily get carried away with the graphics and content and different design elements, but the bottom line is that all needs to be consistent with your customer experience offline as well. But here Spicy is today, to tell you all about the wonderful things you can do keep your website looking fantastic and awesome while reflecting your company’s sophistication from all sorts of different angles.

  1. Consistency: is important throughout the branding design because it creates familiarity, which leads to trust and ultimately more sales, yay! Keep your branding colours consistent throughout the design to create a similar ‘look and feel’. Remember what you project through the design on your website will contribute to how you want your company’s personality to look. If you want to come across as funny and adventurous, then go for it start incorporating that into your website.
  2. Functionality: is it easy to use?
    Spicy wants to let you in on a little secret, KISS; just kidding guys, I’m sure you’ve already heard of this, if not, fantastic! K.I.S.S (keep it simple stupid) is a great guide for all things design. Navigation, is just about the most important thing on your website- in respect to functionality- without it, your customers will have trouble contacting you and reaching your product. You should use obvious wordings and keep things categorised.
  3. Content: important information is easy to find. Businesses often think that loads of content on each page works because you’re getting your information out. However, this is not the case, it’s always best to keep it as minimal as possible, imagine how strained everyone’s eyes would be? It’s also definitely not fun having to search through loads of content to find one teeny weeny thing you need, the best way is to separate where you can, add large titles, emphasise on certain words by setting them in bold or alternatively you can separate it all into different pages. If you do this you should also consider bread crumbs, these show the path to the current page, with links to go back; this helps keep the user on track of where they are without loosing their head.
    Below is an example of a website that’s implemented bread crumbs
  4. Focus: get straight to the point and present your product quickly
    Waffling on is a big no no, when you’re selling a specific product or just your brand, then display the positives quickly without over doing it, no one wants to sit there reading 100 reasons why they should buy something, keep it simple, legible and the writing creative. Your audience will come swarming in if they hear “3 steps to …”, it’s short, gets to the point and plus, you can just as easily add “read more below”.
  5. Status: give an idea through the branding of your site your market positioning. Your website’s design will highly reflect on the image of the company, if your website was designed in 1998 they will look terribly outdated, so keep the content updated and fresh, it will increase your website traffic and will positively reflect on the company and will surely bring you

Get cracking guys, it’s time to spice up those sites and make them look spectacular just like your business. Remember to keep things consistent, don’t waffle on and show your company’s name, brand and reputation while still keeping to your true self. Oh and keep those navigation menu’s looking clean!

For more info, check Making Your Homepage Count for some examples of well designed websites.

Once again, that’s a wrap for this weeks designing for Your Website month. Tune in for our weekly Spicy Your Website for great tips on making small businesses websites mind-blowing.