Business web page design

There are two types of businesses – businesses that have a web page and businesses that will have one soon. Having a profitable web presence represents a major competitive advantage in 2010. Most business consultants view it as an additional sales and information channel for your business.

Some managers and small business owners are still worried about their company web pages. There are several reasons for that:

• Lack of knowledge in a constantly evolving trends and technologies, that results in unexplained fear of the unknown,

• Lack of quality time devoted to constant and regular  improvement of the company web page,

• Lack of patience – expecting miracles from the company web page within 3 months,

• Being overwhelmed with the design of the web page rather than the content and functionality

In this article I would like to focus on top 5 web page design mistakes that we usually come across. Feel free to suggest more in the comments to this article.

Here is the list:

1.    Using custom web page design.

Let me explain because this sounds a bit strange. After all every client wants a custom (unique) web page design. In general if you are a big company and have huge budget dedicated specifically to the design of your web page this might be the best option. However, most of the small business owners need decent looking web pages within the $1000 range. The low cost solution to this problem is to purchase a professionally designed template. The main advantage of the predesigned web page template is that in most of the cases these templates are cheap (around $50) and designed by professional designers. The trade off is that your business web page design will not be unique (Probably 300 – 400 other people worldwide will have similar design). Remember that you can always hire a company to tweak the template to better suit your needs. Final word on this point – remember… very few companies make unique, beautiful and functional web pages from scratch on low budget. If you are not a big company it’s a waste of resources.

2.    Overwhelmed with design rather than content and functionality.

Web page design is not the most important part of your online presence. The most important issue to consider is the purpose of your business web page. Why do you need a web page for your business? Because you must have one? Can you be more specific? The company web page could serve many purposes:

• Could be used as online business card (the most primitive and basic purpose)

• Could be additional source of information. Used by your customers to download .pdf brochures, presentations and forms.
• Could be used as online product catalogue to display your products and services (Much cheaper than designing and printing product catalogues)
• Could be used to collect customer information via email subscription.
• Could be used tp sell products and services – online store with integrated payment processing software
• A combination of some or all of the above.

3.    Readability.

This is an easy one. Check the font size of your web page. If it is hard to read contact the company that developed your site and ask them to increase the size. Stick to traditional easy to read fonts like Arial, Verdana, and Tahoma. In or experience 12pt to 14pt is good size. Provide plenty of white space and use paragraphs for long texts. Offer “print” option for the articles or to download them as .pdf

4.   Slow loading web pages.

Google as well as other search engines “evaluate” your web page based on how long it takes to be loaded in the browser (As well as another 250 factors!). As a result “heavy” web pages – pages that have redundant or outdated source code and heavy animations or images are penalized in the search results. This of course is a very high level explanation. As a general rule always use simple code and optimized images in your web pages so that they are loaded fast enough. Remember the last time that you tried to check a web page and it took “ages” to load. What did you do? You probably waited for 5 seconds and just closed it.

5.    (Not!) Using flash.

That one is really simple. Don’t use flash in your web pages. Google does not like flash. There is more involved explanation to why this is so but it is irrelevant for the purpose of this article. You can use flash to create web banners for your site that will be shown on other web pages. In this way you don’t have problems. Avoid using flash banners or elements on your web site.

Feel free to comment.