Website Design: The Basics

Introduction

This article is going to show small business owner the basics of design and layout of a website.  This article is aimed at people who are using a DIY website tool, but the information can be valuable to anyone who is getting ready to get a website up and running.  Knowing the elements of design will help inform you as to what is needed from your website’s design.

Because this is a basics article, I won’t focus on things that should be added to a page for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes, those elements will be covered in a later article.

Elements of a web page

Let’s start with the elements of a web page, I will use the Toolkit as an example site for this article and together we can break down the site and see why I made the decisions that I did when I first designed the toolkit:

Header

The header is the top-most portion of the web page and will almost always include the logo of your company along with several ways to contact your business.  For any type of business that wants customers to contact them via a phone number, that number should be at the top of every page usually on either the right or left hand side of the header. Because I would like my visitors to contact me using the Toolkits various social media outlets, I used that space instead for my…

Social Media Call Outs

If you are using Social Media (SM) sites like Twitter and Facebook to help market your business, having links to your SM accounts prominently displayed will give your customer a visual reminder to visit the links and friend/follow your company.

Footer

The footer usually holds 2 important elements if a webpage, 1st is the bottom navigation menu, this allows customers who have gotten to the bottom of your page navigate to another page without having to scroll back to the top of the page, this will make your customer’s experience on your site better, which will make them more likely to stay on your site.  The 2nd page element in your footer will be the copyright information.  This will help you protect the content in your site and it is one of the triggers that search engines look at when ranking your site.

Navigation

The Navigation menu will usually be located either at the top or down the left-hand side of your site.  The navigation menu will include links to the main pages on your site, but may not always include links to the sub sections/pages of your site.

Content

This is the text and images on your page, you will want to have a good amount of content on each page to give your customers information about your business/service/product etc. you should shoot for a minimum between 250 and 300 words of relevant content per page.  This amount of text will give search engines a lot of content to pull keywords from.

Call to action (not Pictured)

The call to action is a prompt for a customer to perform some action. Whether this is subscribing to a mailing list/newsletter or to send you their contact info to get more information/a quote etc; the call to action should be prominently displayed so that the customer can not miss the fact that the call is there.

Best Practices 

Consistent design

Most sites should maintain a consistent design from page to page, the content on each page, when you start moving the navigation menu to different places on each page you start to confuse and frustrate your potential customers.  Additionally when you radically change your page design and color scheme with each new page the effect is jarring; colors and design help your site visually convey a feeling for your customers about your business; whether that feeling is warm and inviting or cool and professional.  When you radically change your design and color scheme from page to page, the whole site comes out as schizophrenic and un professional.

Images 

Websites are a visual medium and as such benefit from having good pictures on them.  Remember that the key for images is to not let the images overwhelm the content of the site.  Ideally pictures should be used to accent and highlight the content of the site whether that is showing the customer your products or examples of your services, or just as a design element to help convey an overall feeling for your company and website.  I would say that for any non ecommerce site, limiting yourself to 3 images per page is a good guideline, unless the page is a portfolio or gallery page. In the case of those types of pages, your main concern will be presenting your images in a clear and concise manner and organizing them for easy viewing by your customers.  For ecommerce sites, I would limit images to 3 on any pages that are not a product page, and then depending on the type of ecommerce software that you use and the options available to you, I would limit you to 4-5 images per product.

A note on the quality of images, I can't stress enough how important having good professional quality images are going to be for your business especially if you are selling things through your site, this means taking professional quality photos of your products, the snapshot of your necklace that you took with your 5 year old camera phone will not cut it.  This also goes for more informational websites, either have professional quality photos taken, or use a stock image source like istockphoto.com or Photos.com, you can usually get a good deal per image (around a dollar an image) and they are professional quality images.

Words

The content of your site, this is what tells your customers about you. The text on each page should be focused and concise, but not too sparse that you are left with nothing for a search engine to pull keywords from.  I would normally aim for 250 -400 words of relevant content on your pages.  And make sure that you are using terms that you would like to be found for in search engines.  If you are a landscaper in Denver, then not using the terms landscaping and Denver on your pages would be foolish.

The Wrap Up

Creating a professional website is an exercise in consistent design and relevant content.  Anyone can learn these skills and create professional looking websites, but as with all things, it takes time and effort to do it right.  If you have decided that a website is the next step for your business, then a working knowledge of basic website design is vital, as is an honest evaluation of your ability with design and the amount of time that you can devote to the creation of your site.  If you decide that you are ready to take the next step and create your site, then the tips that I have presented here will give you a head start.  Good Luck!

Matt Houck is the Founder of the Small Business Owners Web Toolkit.

He currently is a Small Business Consultant.  Read more about him on his SBwebtoolkit Bio Page