Category: Website Builder Tips

Your website is often the first and only way potential customers find out about your business. And as website visitors make a decision in the first 6 seconds about whether to stay or leave, it’s vitally important that you present your business in the right way, and give your visitors the information they’re looking for.

Yet so many small businesses make classic mistakes with their site, effectively showing all these customers the door before they’ve even got inside.

So what are the important web design tips you should follow?

1. Make it easy to move around your website

People usually arrive on your website looking for specific information. If they don’t find it quickly they will leave, and have the impression that you’re a disorganized business.

The reason that websites have menus along the top or down the side is because user expect a particular format for websites. Stick to this format, and make the most important information the first thing they see.

Have a think about why people are on your website. Are they looking for your address or contact details? Do they want to know your opening hours? Do the want to know if you stock a particular item? Are they interested in the trade bodies you’re a member of? Answering these questions will help you organise the pages that should be easiest to find.

Here are a few tips

*Try icons. They’re visually appealing and easy to use
*Group related links together, such as ‘your account, support, contact us’ and ‘Ts & Cs, legal, privacy.
*Make it clear to users which page they’re on by using clear headlines

2. Use Clear Calls To Action

What is the aim of your website? Do you want people to buy something? do you want them to get in touch? Do you want them to sign up to your newsletter? The biggest mistake small business websites make is not having a clear call to action that asks there users to commit to something.

Whatever you want your users to do, make it clear by using a call-to-action button that grabs their attention. Here are a few tips:

*Think about the colour, size, shape and position of your call to action. Make it clear, make it stand out, and put it in an obvious place.
*Don’t confuse users by having multiple calls to action. Decide the main thing that you want them to do and stick to it.

3. Pick the right colours

This might seem a little obvious, but choosing the right colours is critical to your website. I’m not just talking about picking those colours that reflect your logo, your brand or your stationary. But it’s about making sure your colours stand out on the page, making it easy for people to read your content.

The right colours can also effective at sorting out the hierarchy of a page. Here’s some ideas:

*Look at how popular websites use colour and contrast to make stuff easy to read and understand.
*Try using size rather than just colour to make important text stand out.
*Test drive a Colour Contrast tool to check your colour choice such as http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html

4. Organise Your Content

This is where most small businesses make the biggest mistakes. In a desperate urge to show website visitors how much stuff a business does, many put so many words on their site that it becomes impenetrable to readers.

The truth of it is that most website visitors can’t be bothered to read much text, and will avoid doing so unless it’s absolutely necessary. Even those embarking on a page of text will scan and skip to the end.

So when adding content to your site it’s important to get it into the right hierarchy, making it easy for users to jump to the most relevant section.

Here are three tips:

*Make your font big enough to be easy to read.
*Make significant use of white space, to focus the user on your content
*Make use of titles, subtitles, paragraphs, bullets, block quotes and other tricks to break up long passages.

And never make spelling or grammatical mistakes.

5. Reduce Clutter

This point follows on from content. Generally speaking, the more elements on a page, the harder it is to read. Websites with crammed homepages are difficult for visitors to take in and understand.

And website visitors who leave because they are overwhelmed, are not likely to return soon.

Clutter includes images too – they should only be there to capture attention and guide the user.

Here’s how to reduce clutter:

*With every element on a page, ask yourself the question: ‘can visitors understand this page if I took this away’. If the answer is yes, then you probably don’t need it.
*Make your most important content the easiest to find. Don’t let minor items get in the way of major ones.
*Help your users find what they’re looking for – don’t bog them down with other items like advertisements or promotions.

That’s it

These are five of my web design tips to make sure your small business website gets settled on the right course. Got any others? Leave a comment below.

I’ve written quite a bit on this blog about online privacy. When it comes to advertising, last year there was a lot of media attention given to behavioural targeting – where advertisers reach you based on your online behaviour. Advertising firm Phorm was at the centre of that furor, and they exited the UK late last year.

Then of course there was Google Street View, and the fear that it was invading personal privacies (and helping thieves to boot!). Last year we advised you all to add a privacy policy to your website, to make it clear what information you were collecting about visitors.

New Code of Practice

Well now it looks like Websites will have to stick to a new code of practice put in place by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The whole point is to make sure that your website visitor’s information is kept secure and private.

The Personal Information Online Code of Practice simply firms up the advice we gave with regard to having privacy policy. Websites need to make their privacy settings clear and store data securely. There are 8 principles for looking after personal information, but what it boils down to is that only specific, relevant data can be gathered, if a website doesn’t needs the personal information, then it must not hold onto it longer than necessary.

For example, if a company no longer needs your email address or credit card details, they’re obliged to delete them.

If you have a log in to your site, the privacy settings must be well highlighted.

A representative of the ICO said: “Organisations must be transparent so that consumers can make online privacy choices and see how their information will be used.”

“Individuals can take control by checking their privacy settings and being careful about the amount of personal details they post to social-networking sites and elsewhere online,” he continued.

If websites fail to abide by the code, they could be forced to do so by the ICO.

What about you?

Have you put a privacy policy on your site? Do you think that fears over online privacy are overblown? Leave us a comment below.

“Can I insert a search box on my WebEden site” is a question us guys and gals at WebEden get asked on a regular basis.

And the answer is yes: you can use the Google search bar that is located in the library of your website builder.

Unfortunately there’s a shortcoming: this does search your website, but will only search those pages that have been indexed by Google.

If they haven’t been found and indexed by Google (for example if they are very recent, or are not well linked), then the Google search bar will not yield any results. As our SEO guide will tell you, Google can take up to 3 months to find and crawl your site so it can be a long wait before your website is fully searchable.

We’ve been scratching our heads to find a way around this problem, and we’ve just come up with a solution.

Drum roll…

[Enter Stage Left]: Atomz Site Search. Atomz have created a FREE Premier site search tool that crawls your site the moment you sign up. It grabs the Page Title – Description from your pages and displays them just like Google does.

To put this search facility on your website, you need to sign up on Atomz.com. You get to pick which type of search box you require from standard to advanced dependant on how detailed you would like the user to be able search.  Also you can change the colours of the links so they match the colour of your website.

HTML Snippet

Once you have setup everything with Atomz, grab the HTML code they give you, and paste the code into the WebEden HTML Snippet. In case you didn’t know, the HTML Snippet is located in the Library of your File Manager.

Once you have pasted the code in you will need to make just one change to the code in order for the results to appear properly.

In the line of code that has <form method="get" action="http://search.atomz.com/search/"> you will need to add target="_parent" so it looks like this <form method="get" action="http://search.atomz.com/search/" target="_parent">.

If you do not do this change then the search will open occur within the snippet rather than the whole website.

That’s it.

Have a go adding the Atomz search box and let us know how you get on. Or if you know a better solution then please comment below.

You want to use icons on your website. You have a look at word and see what icons and clip Art came with your computer.

And what do you find? Not much of any use!

You then turn to the web, searching and scouring through the net trying to find the perfect icons for your web site. At best you only find a few icons in each set.

That’s where Icon Finder comes in.

Iconfinder provides high quality icons for web designers and developers in an easy and efficient way.

You can search through 147,174 icons or browse 417 icon sets – which ar constantly expanding.

This is a great place to find FREE icon packs for your website builder. It gives you the ability to search for a particular icon e.g. TWITTER. This will bring up hundreds of Twitter icons.

Once you have found the icon you were searching for you can then view the ICON PACK, this will give you all the icons that are designed in the same way.

So you can see all the icons for facebook, stumbleupon and RSS to name but a few.

This will make your site look more universal rather than having a Twitter logo designed one way and a Facebook logo designed another way.

Some packs do have licences which means you can use them for Personal Use only or you may have to provide a link back to the Author of the icons.

You can even download the .ico version of the image, so if you are using windows you can use them for folder images as alternatives to the standard folder symbol that you get.

Hey if you designed some Icons yourself then why not submit them and share them with the world? You could maybe even ask for a link back to your WebEden website!

Well if you decide to use any of these icons, let us know…

If you have any sites that offer the same or something similar then post a comment and help out your fellow designers.

A couple of months ago we had a guest blog from Alison Cross of Alisoncross4webs that talked about how to put The Gold above the Fold.

Newspaper Talk

This phrase is borrowed from Newspaper publishing. It means that if you have something really important that you want everyone to notice, make sure you put it high up on the page, above the place where people fold  their newspaper.

Website Talk

When this applies to building a website, the ‘fold’ is the lowest part on the page that people can see without scrolling.

As many people do not scroll down web pages, it’s important to put your most important information (your gold) above this point (the fold).

Screen Sizes & Resolutions

That’s all very well, but there is a problem: There are a lot of different sized screens with different resolutions. And some people have toolbars installed too. This means that some users can see more of your website than others. And that means that the fold can fall in many different places.

Finding the Fold

So how do you find out where this fold is? Thanks to a handy little visualisation tool from Google, its now possible to accurately see where the fold is for your website for people using different screens.

The Google Browser Size tool lets you understand how everyone sees your website. For any point on the screen, the tool lets you know what percentage of people can see it without scrolling.

Here’s an image of what it looks like:

The tool isn’t perfect. It assumes that your website is left hand justified rather than centre justified (like most WebEden websites are). Nevertheless, when you’re making a website you can use the tool to make sure the important stuff can be seen by everyone.

Try using the browser size tool on your website and leave us a comment below.