If you’d like your small business website to stand out from the crowd, here are some practical website design tips that could help you to achieve more traffic, higher conversions and increased sales from your website.

Objectives

Know your site’s objectives – The success of your company’s website should, at the end of the day, hinge on how well it achieves your objectives. To help with identifying your website’s objectives, here’s a starter list of the most common ones:

• Generate more qualified traffic
• Produce more leads
• Sell more products
• Educate buyers
• Generate passive income
• Increase employee productivity.

Once you identify all the objectives for your site, see if you can’t prioritise what the top three objectives are. Keeping these top three objectives for your website in the forefront, you’ll do a far better job of designing a website that achieves your objectives.

Identity

Make your online identity synch up with your offline one – Most small businesses have spent many hours and dollars developing an offline company identity. This identity, found in existing signage, PowerPoint presentations or brochures, may have already established an image in the minds of visitors who land on your site. That’s why you should work hard to incorporate logos, icons, colours and typestyles from your offline identity into your online one.

Key Actions

Identify the three  key actions you would like your site visitors to do on your site – A short time ago, I was hired to audit a client’s website. When I met with the owner, I asked him to name the top three things he wanted visitors to do after arriving at his website. He said he wanted them to :

1) place an order for his spa covers;
2) understand why his spa covers were superior to the competitors’ and
3) order accessory items.

But when I visited his site for the first time, I couldn’t see how to do any of these three tasks. For your small business website to succeed, first identity your Three most important outcomes and then make each one glaringly obvious. Use whatever design ideas you and your website designer can come up with (i.e. box them in, shade them a different color, use bursts), but just make sure they’re as obvious as the nose on your face.

Entice

Draw visitors in with your first two paragraphs of copy. You’ve got between 15 and 30 seconds to convince a visitor to stay on your site, so your first 100 words of copy have got to be compelling. I once heard a webmaster refer to these first 100 words as your “opening statement”. And much like the lawyer arguing in court, if your opening statement doesn’t convince your visitor, you’ll fail to win your case.

Search

Consider including a search box – According to website marketing guru Jakob Nielsen, 50 percent of all website visitors are search-dominant; meaning they arrive at a website fully expecting to search its content using a search box. So, if your site contains many pages (over 100), articles, white papers, or back issues of newsletters, provide a search box that’s easy to find and use.

Tagline

Use a tagline – Good sites often use a tagline to communicate what their site is all about, and place it inside the front page header for maximum exposure. Some of the world’s most popular websites use this approach including:

• Facebook – “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”
• YouTube – “Broadcast Yourself.”

Consistency

Keep the web page layout consistent throughout your site – I disagree with those who say the home page template should differ from the site’s interior pages. In my mind, all pages, images, elements, typefaces, headings, and footers should stay consistent throughout your site.

Succint

Keep text short – Recent statistics show that people read from computer screens 25% slower than from paper. To address this, break up your small business’ website copy into small blocks, use shorter paragraphs, lead off text sections with subheads, and occasionally use bullet pointed lists.

FAQs

Provide a FAQ section – For recurring questions, a FAQ section can be a godsend. A FAQ will also help first time visitors get acquainted with your company and its philosophy. But more importantly, a FAQ section will build trust and credibility in the mind of a visitor by helping them answer their own questions.

Sales Tools

Make your sales tools available on your site – One of my larger clients hangs its latest PowerPoint sales presentations off its website. That way, one of its sales reps can give a product demo to a prospect in a different state without either of them leaving their offices. If your small business is national in scope, think of the travel savings if you adopt this approach.

Contact

Provide contact information on every page – Many times buyers print off web pages for further review. Then, they end up contacting your company from that piece of paper. That’s why it’s so important to include your company’s address, phone numbers and email at the bottom of each web page. As a marketer, your job is to make it as easy to do business with your company as possible. This is one way.

Media

Increase media access to your company with a press room – If one objective of your site is to generate media coverage, consider adding a self-serve “Press Room” to the site. The more accessible your website is to the media, the more your company will be written about.

Follow these twelve tips and you’ll be well on your way to a standout website design.