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Five Web Design tips for small businesses

Five Web Design tips for Maximising the Benefits from your Small Business WebsiteIf you own a small business such as a restaurant, shop, salon or garage, creating a website to highlight your services can be an effective way to bring people to your front door. But in order to get the most out of it, you must carefully design your website according to the nature of your business. Here are five tips for getting the most out of your online investment.

Always choose usability over fancinessWhen designing a website it can be very easy to get carried away with colourful graphics, animated features and other bells and whistles. These are all well and good, provided that they don’t subtract from the usability of your page. First and foremost you want people to be able to find what they are looking for with ease – being impressed by the slickness or prettiness of your home page should be at most a secondary reaction.

Showcase what you have to offerYour website gives you a fantastic chance to showcase your products and services, so don’t waste that opportunity to impress. If you have a restaurant then be sure to display your menu online (complete with mouth-watering pictures of your dishes). If you run a beauty salon, present a full list of your treatments with a few gushing client testimonials thrown in to really drive the message home. In short, if you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Provide clear contact and address detailsThis is a simple and fundamental point, but it’s surprising how many websites fail to do this. If the main purpose of your website is to bring people to your doorstep or to call you to make an appointment/ reservation, then make sure it’s so simple to contact you that a three-year-old chimp could do it.

Keep anything important ‘above the fold’The ‘fold’ being all the space on the screen before the user has to scroll down. Many people won’t scroll far, and some browsers will flat-out refuse to scroll down at all. So keep anything crucial above the fold, and bear in mind that the further down the page you bury something, the less chance it has of being seen.

Create a mobile version of your siteMore and more people are using their mobile phones to check out prices and other information online before they walk into a local business. Creating a version of your site that will display optimally on a phone screen is a great way of reaching these people.

If you don’t have the necessary skills to design and develop a website on your own, speak to one of our design team today about your ideas and aspirations for your new website. It could be the difference between a successful or unsuccessful online presence.

Call Onit Solutions your friendly web design agency today on 0191 209 1529.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jon Celeste .