Making a great first impression for your website is arguably the most important thing for your small business, especially medical and spa sites that accept online appointments. Even brick-and-mortar stores that sells products can benefit from a website that showcases their inventories and helps customers find their locations. Oftentimes, your website can be a hindrance verses helpful if your visitors’ user experience is not so great. Your homepage is the first contact that you have with your customers to make a great first impression about your company, and if it doesn’t hook visitors quickly, you can miss out on hundreds of potential clients.

The Internet has modernized marketing, and a website artful web design is a great first step toward using the Internet to your advantage. It’s a golden opportunity to make a great first impression to millions of people.

It’s also important that your webpage showcase your business’s value. By following our 5 simple web design tips and formatting your page for search engines, you maximize the amount of Internet traffic your site receives and the number of visitors who become paying customers. This online PowerPoint presentation will introduce you to five quick tips for designing a great website.

1. Optimize Content

Display your most important content in coveted spaces. Use visual hierarchy to place your content in spaces on a webpage that you want your website visitors to pay attention to. The order of your content matters a great deal also because visual hierarchy tells us that the eyes move top to bottom, left to right. This means you’ll get the most eyes on your image in the top left corner of your site, and those eyes could very well mean more clicks. Not to mention, you make a great first impression by doing that. The key is not to put too much content in these spaces because your visitors may feel overwhelmed and you won’t get the desired results.

2. Make It Easy To Read

Text on a webpage is extremely important. It provides the substance to an image by providing the information, description or answers questions even before they’ve been asked. Know this; don’t make your visitors squint to read your text. Paying close attention to font colors and sizes is important.

For example, putting pale gray text on a white background will make your visitors struggle to read it to the point they will probably just give up and move on. Small fonts may give you more room to add more text in certain areas of a webpage, but if it requires visitors to use a magnifying glass, not only is that not cute, but you’ve completely lost them. Fancy fonts can oftentimes add a unique look to a website. Make sure you choose fonts that are reader-friendly and renders in all browsers. Otherwise, your visitors will wonder if they’re reading in a different language because your text will be gibberish to them.

3. Study The Competition

Do a little web design recon on your competitors’ websites. Research their websites with specific purposes such as their approach to certain page layouts or the type of information provided and requested via their contact form. Whatever it is, decide if implemented it on your website would be added value for your visitors.

4. Keep It Clutter-Free

With the Internet revolutionizing marketing, the web has become quite cluttered with ads, banners, pop-ups, buttons, badges, signs, etc. — sometimes it can be just too overpowering. Give your site visitors a break from the clutter and noise. Making use of things like white and flat designs can be a refreshing experience for your site visitors. Remember, sometimes less is more.

5. Make It Mobile-Ready

What good is a professional small business website if it’s not professional-looking on mobile devices? In today’s world, nix! Don’t despair! The Envisager Studio San Diego responsive web design team can help you bring your website big ideas to life and get you on the super highway. After all, you don’t want to miss out on potential site visitors/users/customers just because they’re on the subway, do you?

Inspired by this article? Leave us a comment below or contact us today for your free website design consultation.

Hazel Burgess

Hazel Burgess
FOUNDER/SEO DIRECTOR

Hazel is the Founder & SEO Director at Envisager Studio, a premier website design agency specializing in WordPress website design, development and internet marketing. In her spare time, she writes about search engine optimization, website design, and internet marketing.