Website Design 101

for Small to Medium Sized Businesses

In our opinion, in most cases, the best solution for a website design will involve simplicity. Many sites these days are designed with multiple platforms in mind, so they will look great on desktop, tablet and cell phone screens. This is called responsive design, and is becoming the norm for website developers. The look of websites has become more streamlined, and in our opinion, that’s usually to the benefit of the content whether it’s an artist’s portfolio, E-commerce site, or a carpet cleaning company’s listing of services.

Here are the basic visual website design principles we try to keep in mind:

• Easy to understand navigation

• Proper use of color

• Proper use of animation

• An easy to use layout

• Pleasing to the eye

• Appropriate to the topic

• Design elements don’t get in the way of the content

• Great content that’s easy to find, navigate, consume, and share

Clean design using a limited color palette has become popular, and allows key graphics to stand out. A well designed logo, or high resolution photo banner can then take center stage. Excellent, yet selective, high quality photography add life to well written copy. Content is key as they say.

Ease of font readability – just as in print design– is also important, and should not be over-looked. This means keeping background colors and text colors contrasting. Think black and white, or contrasting neutrals. (see graphic below for an example of what NOT to do)

Keeping things simple, less navigation is best - come up with the usually 5-10 important pages of content for your site, and use drop-down menus to represent sub section categories as they may apply to each main topic. So for example your “Services” main navigation heading might then have a drop-down menu for your list of 5 services, each having its own page of content.

Links to your social media should be easy to find - usually in the top of the layout or bottom footer area. Also link sharing can be enabled, if you’ve written content - such as blog posts for example that you want visitors to be able to easily share on their own Facebook pages. This helps increase traffic back to your website, and is part of an overall good design strategy.

When programming your site, pertinent contact information for your business is important in search engine optimization. Using your complete physical address with phone number on your homepage in plain text is often placed in either or both the header and footer of the page layout.

Words that people most commonly would use to find your business should be part of the copy for the landing (home) page. The title tag within the HTML in the header is also important for the description for your business and will be indexed by Google to list your company.