Updated 13 Nov 2015
Business web design
So what's the difference between business web site design and general every day web design?
There are quite a few notable differences - If you take a look at at an up to date corporate website and then compare it with a personal site or gamer website you will quickly see they are far from being similar, some of the things that will hit you straight away will be style and layout, navigation, use of colours, and site features.
The thing to bear in mind when developing a business or corporate style website is that you
must come across as a serious business, failiure to do this will result in loss of business. You must convey the message that you are a professional company that is serious, well established and that you are here to stay, this will give your potential customers/clients the confidence to use your product or service knowing that they can always come back to you and that you are a trustworthy company that will support their needs and requirements in the future.
So how do you achieve this status?
Here are some key point that will help put you on the right track of building a successful business / corporate style web site:
Avoid flashy effects like the plague!
A site with too much flash or an abundance of bouncing, scrolling, or any other wierd and wonderful effects on it can give a playful fun theme and although novel for the first 5 minutes this novelty soon turns to irritation, remember people are visiting to find a product or service not to see their mouse curser turn into a butterfly that trails across the screen when they move!
User friendly navigation is a must.
Make sure your navigation buttons or links are easy to see and self explanatory, this may sound obvious but there are many sites that use symbols with no text as buttons leading to their most important pages, if you have a 'buy now' button make sure it is easily noticable and that it is actually labelled with what it's for - People just dont have the time to hover over every little button to find out where it leads or what it does - that's if they notice it in the first place.
Keep it clean
By this I mean organised and easy on the eye - a site that is too 'busy' can become hard to concentrate on and a user can easily miss vital areas of important text. When building a website try using 'line-height' (css) to increase the space between each line of text, you can also put some well placed images on your page to nicely break up the text, dont be afraid of leaving whitespace between articles/images - this will quickly make a page easier to read and more 'comfortable' to look at, borders and background colours can be used to seperate important articles and other information and make them stand out on your site.
Dont waffle - get to the point!
The easier it is for your customers to find what they want on your site the higher your chances of converting the visit into a sale, so keep all text areas short, simple and to the point.
Back yourself up
If you are selling a service or product and want to gain trust and respect from potential buyers or clients the best way is to provide some form of evidence that you can actually offer a good product or service - Portfolio's of recent work will serve this purpose, as well as testimonials from happy customers, write-up's from magazines or news articles, any awards gained and so on ....
Font Appeal
There's an abundance of fonts doing the rounds these days and the majority of them should never be used on your website, you need to make sure that the font you use is clean, easy to read, and viewable by all - just because you have 'comic sans' installed on your PC it doesnt mean everyone else does too!
Using css you can offer an alternative font though if the viewer doesn't have your font of choice.
Some fonts you cant go wrong with:
Arial - Excellent for good clear text (it was, however actually designed for print)
Helvetica - Mainly installed on mac's neat and modern looking
Verdana - Sometimes confused with arial renders well, looks crisp and professional
Times new roman - Pretty much everyone has it installed
Georgia - serif font with rounded lines thats quickly becoming popular on a lot of web 2.0 sites
Search engine friendly pages
Make sure Google & the other major search engines can find your content easily & can get an idea of what they are all about by using the correct meta-tags for the page, try to make sure all your different pages use a different title & description relevanat to that service or product.
Tablet & smart phone compatibility
I can't stress how important this is in todays marketplace as so many people now use their handheld devices to search the internet - failing to have a website that is user friendly & functional can potentially lose you a large percentage of business!.
If you are looking for a great new website then get in touch on : or visit our
Business website design page to find out exactly what we do & how we can help you.
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