Business websites should be designed to be inviting for visitors and for search engines. This means a balance of graphics and text. Text is required for search engines to under what your website is about.
Do…
- …create a professional BIG company image. The Internet is a creates a level playing field for businesses of all sizes. Use your company website to present you as a competent quality business.
- …grab someone’s attention in 3 seconds or less. When visitors arrive you have approximately 3 seconds of their attention before they decide to leave or look around. Make it clear what you can do for your visitor.
- ...design a simple and intuitive navigation. Make it easy for visitors to find their way around your website. Follow you natural selling process.
- …have a clear call to action to get results. People will do what you ask. Simply asking them to “Buy Now” can convert an interested prospect into a paying customer.
- …put your contact info on every page. Once you have your visitor’s attention, make it easy for them to reach you.
Don’t…
- …use blinking or scrolling text or auto-loading sound. This annoys people and they will quickly leave your website.
- …use graphic intensive slow loading pages. If a page takes over a few seconds to load, visitors will quickly leave and never see your great looking website.
- …use an Intro or Splash page. The search engines place great importance on the home page and with little or no text you site will never get high search engine rankings.
- …design a website in frames. Frames are cool and easy for designers, but search engines dislike websites built in frames.
- …have pages that are full width. Most monitors today are very wide. Pages that stretch full width are very difficult to read.
Eye tracking studies give web designers insight into what attracts the attention of visitors. This is very important in business web design. Once you have optimized your website to bring in traffic, following a few design rules can make sure you catch your reader’s attention. After all, most visitors make up their mind to stay of go in the first few seconds.
Results from the Nielsen Norman Group’s study show that the dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an “F”. Web visitors begin in the upper left and sweep to the right. They then drop down the page a bit and do a shorter horizontal sweep and then they scan down the left side content.
From eye tracking studies we can establish 10 guidelines for web design.
- Content / Images in the upper left quadrant are most likely to be seen
- Right side content and content lower on the page is less likely to be seen.
- Larger font headlines draw the eye.
- Shorter paragraphs are read more than large blocks of text.
- Smaller font body text is read and larger font body text is scanned.
- Numbers are read as numerals, but skipped over as text.
- Bigger images get more attention than smaller images.
- Bulleted or numbered lists hold readers attention
- Banner ads are ignored.
- Fancy fonts and fancy words look like promotion and are ignored.
The last point was well illustrated with the U.S. Census Bureau’s homepage. In a study, 86% of users failed to the country’s current population which was presented in a large red font.
OK, you are starting up a business and you want to create a logo. Where do you start? What makes up a great logo? Your business logo design is a key part of your branding and makes your business memorable. There are six aspects to a really great logo design.
- Simple / Scalable
- Emotional Appeal
- Unique
- Relevant
- Shows action
- Color / Contrast
Simple and scalable: Your logo should be easily recognizable at a very small size on a business card or at a very large size on a vehicle graphic. This means communicating a single idea and not using complex pictures and concepts. Complex designs hide your message.
Emotional appeal: Your logo is part of your branding strategy. This means communicating at an unconscious emotional level. Communicate positive emotions such as trust, joy, safety, status or protection.
Unique: Be different from your competition. If you are in real estate, avoid a picture of a house or roof because that is what so many others do. Your logo needs to make your business stand out and be remembered.
Relevant: Your logo design should symbolize your business and create a positive first impression. Concentrate on an abstract image to represent the feel of your company’s business. Shapes, curves and symmetry can convey meaning.
Show action: This draws in your visitor’s attention. By adding in a partially turned key, shapes or textures a logo can be made to show action. Think of the Nike Swoosh to illustrate running shoes.
Color and Contrast: A great logo must be easily seen and attract attention. Your choice of colors communicates emotion and is an important part of your message. Contrast can be created using colors, texture and use of white space.
A great logo design is a key part of your marketing and branding strategy. This will be a foundation that you will build on for many years.
Let’s say you are looking for an Allis Chalmers 1000 HP, 2300 Volt motor because the one on your centrifugal blower just died. Or maybe you need a second Parkson, Model 32FT2 Gravity Settler because you need to expand your industrial plant’s waste treatment system. Well you have to look no further than Kravas Equipment in Amboy Washington. They actually have many thousands of pieces of surplus equipment. Chances are if you need a key piece of process equipment, they have it.
This is actually one of my favorite stories. They have over 150 acres of land in Amboy, Washington. The president, Bill Kravas, has been buying surplus equipment since 1985 and he is very good at it. The problem is that they are one of the best kept secrets around. They are now the largest surplus equipment dealer west of the Mississippi. Bill Kravas has pretty much filled up all the existing buildings he has and is adding more storage space so he can continue buying more equipment.
Their new website is part of their new marketing effort being headed up by Demetri Kravas and Dawn Lingle. Their job is to reduce their extensive inventory so Bill Kravas can continue purchasing more surplus equipment.
We produced their new website design and development to integrate with their in house database that they use to track their inventory. Their new website allows you to search or browse thru their equipment listings. With a single click, add equipment to a shopping cart and you will get a quote back within 24 hours. If your need is urgent… then give them a call at (360) 247-5151 and ask for Dawn or Demetri.
Portland web design firm, Cyphon Design, specializes in creating high quality yet affordable web designs that promote your business with simplicity and style. They provide the highest quality design services to both small and medium businesses that need a professional image in their marketing materials. They will design a great looking web site and help you with ways to make the most of your Internet marketing. Your website speaks a great deal about your business. By focusing on your customers, giving you the latest technologies along with our creative designs… they make you look good!
Cyphon Design: They have the capabilities and expertise to meet your most exacting requirements. First Cyphon Design spends time understanding your business and your marketing goals. They then translate your marketing message into captivating online designs to give you the image you deserve. Their websites are high-end web designs that are intuitive and easy to navigate.
They design banner ads, Flash ads, create email campaigns. They write ad copy to get your marketing message heard and most of all to get you the results that you need.
We at Doug Williams and Associates have worked with Cyphon Design on multiple projects and it is a pleasure to work with a professional, top notch design firm. Lien Hong, one of principals is an outstanding designer and we wanted to highlight Lien and her company on our blog.
Doug Williams, Web Design / SEO Consultant
A clear “call to action” is a key element of business web design and makes a difference between a website that is merely interesting and one that gets results. A “call to action” in web design refers to website content that compels a user to take action. On the web, people move quickly from site to site and look for something specific. A website that gets results has a clear focus and asks the reader to take some action. This action should be planned and designed in.
Virtually all websites have a purpose to get someone to buy, call, register, request-a-quote or subscribe. Sometimes the call to action can be less obvious, but still effective. Some examples are:
- Watch this video and learn how to save.
- Take our computer network security survey.
- See examples of our business website designs.
- Click here to see how a buying new refrigerator will pay for itself in less than one year.
In planning your website, establish the three actions you want people to do. One should be your primary call to action and the others secondary actions. Make these actions clear and precise. Organize the website navigation, page layout and even the fonts to make the primary call to action clear and easy to find.
Every time you write new web content, there should be some sort of call to action at the end of the topic. The idea is to involve the reader and encourage action.
If you would like to learn more, please go to our website and learn how your business can take advantage of our web design and Internet marketing expertise.
Doug Williams, Internet Marketing Consultant
Here is the business web design and marketing challenge. The Internet is an impersonal medium. Effective business web marketing means breaking through this barrier in a way that adds the human touch back into the Web. Testimonials are a way of bringing in what others are saying about us. After all, what do people who have actually purchased and used your product or service think about it?
Why testimonials are important
Testimonials are important to customers because they lower the risk of doing business with an unknown company. The first hand testimony of a happy customer is more powerful than pages of facts and figures describing the product or service. These endorsements are important because they tell your prospects and customers how others think of you. Testimonials let visitors that you value your customer opinions and it offers an unbiased recommendation for your product
What makes a good testimonial?
First and foremost they should be genuine and believable. They should be specific and have the person’s full name and if they represent a business, the business name. A link back to their website allows visitors to see who made the comment and it rewards your customer with a valuable link back to their website. Testimonials can be a comment, a review it can be in text, audio or video.
Where to place testimonials?
Should testimonials be on their own page? Or placed around the website? We prefer to put them into a PHP Database program and do both. We will design an area on the home page where testimonial excerpts will rotate every 4-5 seconds and place these onto a testimonials page that is created from this same database. Here are a few examples:
Plastic Injection Molding Company
Software Development Company
Business Networking Groups
Link Popularity Service
Getting Testimonials
Testimonials should convey the biggest result your client achieved by working with you. The more specific you can be… the better. Stay away from vague generalities. They should tell about how a problem was solved, how you made them money or how you made them better.
Make requesting testimonials a part of your quality improvement process. At the end of project or when you ship product, ask for feedback and ask for permission to publish their comments. If the feedback isn’t good, use this as a tool to identify and fix problems. If the feedback is good, then you have a good marketing tool.
BeachcombersNW.com is the vacation rental advertising website of choice for beach house rentals in the Pacific Northwest. They have a large database of available vacation rentals that can be searched easily by area, number of bedrooms, price, pet friendly and other options.
They have a large number of number top listings on search engines such as Google for search terms like “beach house Washington” and “beach house Oregon” which brings in large numbers of visitors to shop for beach house rentals. See more #1 search terms
BeachcombersNW serves two groups: vacationers and vacation rental owners. For vacationers they provide a large selection of quality beach properties that can be easily searched, navigated and browsed. Availability checks and questions to owners are easy to do. There are travel resources and area maps to help in planning
For vacation rental owners they allow reasonable advertising rates and exposure to tens of thousands of potential renters. Listings can be done online by the vacation rental owner or for those that want personal service, can be done by beachcombersnw staff.
For traveler resources they supply events calendars with a vast number of local coast events for both Oregon and Washington. For those that like to search visually, there are clickable Oregon and Washington maps where a click will take you to available vacation rentals.
Website design, database design and search engine optimization were done by Doug Williams and Associates. Quality website hosting and website maintenance is also provided by Doug Williams and Associates.
Web Site Navigation
Navigation is the GPS that directs visitors around your website. Design a simple and intuitive navigation system and people can find exactly what they are looking for. This is the single most important element in creating the best website design. Organizing your website’s navigation may seem simple, but it actually requires a great deal of thought.
The flow of your website should follow your natural selling process. Your best sales people know the best way to start from a cold call to clinching the final sale. In designing your website structure, begin by thinking like a customer. The flow should become completely obvious.
Here are 10 navigation design tips for web page design:
- 3 click rule: Make it easy to move around your website. You should be able to any from any page to another within 3 clicks. There should be fast and easy access to information.
- Top or left side: Be predictable and make it easy on visitors. Place the navigation system on the left or the top, just below the header.
- Be consistent: The navigation system should be in the same place on every page and have the same format. Otherwise visitors become confused and frustrated.
- Use standard wording: Keep category names as simple as you possibly can. Don’t make your visitors guess where a link is going to take them.
- Home Page: Include a “Home” link in your main navigation system. Visitors may arrive at a secondary page and will want to easily find your main page.
- Logo links home: Visitors expect that clicking on the logo will take them to the home page. Most sites include their logo in the top left hand corner of each page.
- Sitemap: Large or complex sites should always have a text-based site map in addition to text links. Every page should contain a text link to the site map. Lost visitors will use it to find their way, while search engines spiders will have reliable access to all your pages.
- Internal links: One important aspect of navigation is internal linking between the pages. Placing links within body text connects pages in a natural way.
- Provide Options: individuals have different preferences for finding information. Options can include, sidebar navigation, top navigation, text links and site wide searches.
- Search box: A search feature helps visitors locate information quickly. Make the search box prominent and be sure that it searches all of your site but only your site. If you use a search the web feature, you can quickly lose your visitors.
Navigation provides the structure, the road map and guides visitors down the path that you want. Designed correctly, navigation is a powerful part of your website’s success.
Doug Williams, Internet marketing consultant
The web design acronym CLASS highlights the elements of best in class web design. They are Content, Logical flow, Aesthetics, Simplicity and Search engine optimization. Top business website designers uses a balance of these five key elements to produce websites that meet the goals of business owners.
Eye-catching graphics and style will fail miserably if there is an unfocused message or if no visitors end up coming to the website. The right planning combined with these five elements will produce a winning website.
- Content: Remember visitors arriving are fast paced, click happy and easily bored. Your website content needs to grab your visitor’s attention in order to get results. Content is what tells what you have to offer and creates a “call to action.” If the content does not provide the information needed it will provide little value.
- Logical flow: The organization and flow should follow the natural selling process. Organizing your website’s navigation may seem simple, but it actually requires a good deal of careful thought. One of the first steps is to establish the call to action. What are your goals and what action do you want visitors to take?
- Aesthetics: Develop that right first impression through style, color and simplicity. Design draws your visitors to what is important. Blending of color, graphics and design creates an emotional response to make your website memorable. Color communicates powerfully in business web design. Aesthetics bring in the emotional response that is so important in branding.
- Simplicity: Create a simple and focused message to avoid confusion and gets results. In design you want to capture the visitor’s attention with your message. With search engines, focus and simplicity gets faster and better results. It is important to get the visitor’s attention and understand the purpose of the website in 3 seconds or less.
- SEO: The perfect website without visitors is utterly worthless. Search engine optimization should be designed into the website. Web designers should chart out their SEO plan before beginning their design. Start with keyword research, create a keyword plan and use these keywords in page names, navigation, linking and headings to dramatically improve the design’s effectiveness.
A well-designed website has many facets, but it hard to beat a website designed with CLASS.
Doug Williams, Internet marketing consultant
