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Tips for Designing a Customer-Friendly Website
When it comes to doing business online, many entrepreneurs abandon all sound business judgment:
Your website’s design plays a major role in the user’s decision to either stick around or continue surfing elsewhere. Graphics, layout, load time, fonts and ease of navigation can all influence the user. To develop a site that retains visitors, make it fast, clean, pleasing to the eye and easy to use is our focus.
I’ve heard many small-business owners say they think they “should” get a website. They’re not quite sure what they will do with it, but they’ve been told they should have one.
In most cases, they’re right. A website can be an important marketing tool for almost every small business, but there are a few exceptions. If you have as many customers as your business can handle and you have no desire to grow larger, then there’s no point in marketing on the Internet. But that is not the case for every business!
Have you ever become so attached to part of your web site that you were unwilling to let it go – even if it might be costing you sales?
One part of my business is critiquing small business web sites – and I’ve run across several of them that are so horrendous that there is only one possible explanation: the owner became inexplicably attached to part of his web site, and refused to let it go.
The number of sites that I visited offered free building tools, free web hosting, free 25 megs of web space, free this and free that. It occurred to me that if someone was on a limited budget and the only way they could put a site up would be to use one of these sites, I would have to say “Oh no”.
Start with a clear understanding of the purpose of your site. Is the aim of your site to sell, entertain or inform? The design of your site should be consistent with its purpose. The requirements for a site selling software online will be very different from, say, the website of a local community newspaper. Your site should be as visually appealing as possible.
