Quick Tips On Website Design And Internet Advertising

For years I have been working with small businesses all over the country with internet advertising and web design. The common factor that I have found for many successful business owners that need a website that brings customers is that they are simply too busy to handle the design and marketing of their website. With all the day-to-day of business as usual: providing a service, providing customer service, customer retention, employee management, and bookkeeping; many business owners can’t find the time to build an effective internet advertising program online. Much less learn how to do so. If this describes your business, you need to know these essential tips to create an effective website that will generate customers for your business.

User-Friendly Web Design

Choose a website design that is very easy to navigate for a person who is not familiar with the internet or with your website. Make sure that your business name, logo, and phone number are big and bold across the top of your website. This will allow those users who come to your site looking for service right away to get the information they need without having to navigate through your site. Another important part of a user-friendly web design is choosing a simple navigation bar. Some web design companies will go as far as adding 3 navigation menus for the user.

  • One horizontal at the top
  • One vertical on the left or the right
  • One at the footer of the site

My recommendation is to have 2 navigation menus on every page of your website for easy navigation from anywhere on the site. Another feature of a user-friendly web design is to choose a design that doesn’t include much flash if any. Flash looks very nice but takes a long time to load. If a user has to wait more than 5 seconds for your site to load, many times they will leave your site to find another site.

Communicate to Two Audiences With Your Website

It is important to know that you have two audiences that you are speaking to with your website. The first audience that you are speaking to is your potential customers. Be sure to include all of the services that you offer so that a customer doesn’t have to guess if you offer it or not. A good way to think of it is, that if you don’t mention it on your website a person will assume that you don’t offer it. Many times they will simply refine their search to find a business the specific offers that particular service.

Your second audience to which your website is talking is the search engines. It is vital to the success of your website to communicate to the search engines exactly what information is on your website. You do this by choosing a Title, Description, and Keywords. This is called Meta Data, but more importantly to you, it lets the search engines know what content is on each page of your site. Your title and description will also be used in the search results page of major search engines as a snapshot of your website. Take a look at the image below.

This image shows where your title and description will be displayed on search engines. This is basic on-page optimization for your website.  For some keywords, you can get the first page of major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing by simply adding these tags properly.

Add Unique Content to your website

There are possibly thousands and in some cases millions of websites that talk about the same services that you offer. Each of these businesses has something unique that brought them to their business and makes them stand out. It is important that you show what makes your business unique. Having unique content on your website is possibly the easiest way to generate traffic to your website. If you have a website that speaks about a service that only you offer, it makes it easy for search engines to send the traffic to you. Determine what makes your business unique, and market that service often on your website.

Another way to make your website unique is to frequently add content to your site. While there are many websites online, many never change a single word. By making regular updates to your site, you give your site the best chance of standing out from the crowd.

Choosing the right website design and internet advertising strategy will take time, and can be very challenging. Hopefully, these tips will put you one step closer to the right website design for your business.

Thank you for reading my article. If you have read this article and you would like to hire a web professional to help you with your website design and internet advertising call (770) 766-5600. Browse our website for more information on web design, brochure design, or business printing.

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