4 Ways Website Design Can Affect Your Business

As a small business owner, there are many ways you can make a good impression on your customers: focusing on quality customer service, offering new and innovative products, and featuring competitive prices. However, impressing prospective customers may prove more of a challenge. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, the average web user only spends a maximum of twenty seconds on a web page before making a purchasing decision. If you are ready to create a business website, there are several factors to keep in mind when it comes to how its design may affect your companys success.

Colors and Fonts

The colors and fonts you use on your business website are important factors in its design because these are the first design elements your prospective customers see when they arrive. The contrast between background color and font color can be especially important because if your visitors have to struggle to make out the words, chances are they will leave out of frustration.

Another factor to consider when choosing colors and fonts is whether they are consistent with your brand's image. For example, if your brand's colors are mostly primary, they should be present on your site so that they make a visual match with your company logo. Keeping a color balance can avoid visual distraction and keep your visitors focused on your content instead.

Straightforward Navigation

If you have ever visited a business website and encountered a mass of animation and a site that makes scrolling difficult, chances are you did not visit long and when it comes to creating your own site, this is an experience to keep in mind. If your purchasing and call to action links are buried in a mass of animated figures that you hope will catch your visitors' attention, then they may not bother spending time to find them. The links on your website should be organized by relevance and simple for your visitors to find and access.

Ease of Access on Mobile Devices

Recent studies show that people who access business sites are now doing so more often on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Because of this trend, how fast your company's site loads on a mobile device and its ease of use once it loads may be a key element in how many of your visitors become paying customers. Whether you create your site using a website builder to create your site or hire a professional company to create one, optimization for mobile use can be an important element for long-term success.

Consumer Trust

When consumers first visit your business website, their experience may affect their level of trust in your company. For example, if someone comes to your site looking for products or services and they encounter 404 errors, broken links, or if your site is hard to use, they may believe that what you have to offer them is not of good quality either. This can cause them to lose trust in your company and in turn, you might lose a customer.

Creating a website that your customers will respond to requires careful thought and planning. While there are many factors to keep in mind as you design your business page, considering how each one can create a useful, cohesive whole may increase your website traffic and improve the way you do business.