Web design is obviously very important to making sure that your new potential customers see your business in the way that you want it to be seen. In the same way that a shop would make sure that it is clean and tidy from the outside to attract customers to the inside, your website must be the same. Here are a few fundamentals that everyone should consider and be thinking about when launching or building a new website.


I started work as a web designer many years ago, as I have written in previous blogs information about just how long ago it was, but web design back then (and we are talking 10 years, not 50!) was nothing more than a couple of pictures and a page (or two at most) of text, and that was about it. Very little thought had been given at that time about SEO, or just how pages “felt” to consumers, the paths that customers would take through a site, where they would end up or return on investment by tracking usage of the site. It was just about having a website, back then it was considered cool to have a domain that was either a .com, .co.uk or a .net etc.
The rules have changed a lot, and for your money when starting a site and hosting packages etc, you get a lot of bandwidth for you £ or buck!

And as you will see from any of the sites you and I probably go to everyday, like sky sports.com bbc, msn, yahoo etc they have rich multimedia content flashing away on their homepages, sometimes full video, sometimes games to make you roll your mouse over the advertising. How can small businesses compete with all that going on, I hear you ask? Well, we have developed better and better websites over the years, and our customers have given better and better feedback on how we make effective use of their designs.


Sole traders and small businesses have enough to manage in their everyday life and web design or bringing some kind of impact to their website needn’t be one of them. Do away with the unnecessary extras! Do you need the full flash website? The flashy gimmicks the stuff that won’t really help you. Take a look across the top performing sites in the world. They have spent £1,000,000’s on site research, customer surveys etc - copy from the best! The top performing sites, are the most straightforward. Users really appreciate the simplicity of a well laid out, performing site - just take a look at Google! it’s a classic example.


Give the user what they want, not what you want! - they are often not the same thing, and sometimes quite hard to distinguish, but all the same very important on a crisp clean site. Also remember that less is more. Obviously, information and content is KING for your site, but spread it out, do not put all your products on one page for example, spread them across sub categories, people will expect to drill down categories to find things they want, allow them to do so. By spreading content out, it gives you more content, more space for more content, more pages and more importantly less clutter for your users to experience and see in their use.
So, this is when we come to the next part, navigation.

Often I have come across, fantastic home pages, that once you navigate away from, you then come across a whole different format, with different fonts, different layout of text, everything’s different! - this is a mistake, keep everything uniformed as much as possible. This will help your brand and your business gain credibility. There are some SHOCKING examples I would love to share with you, but I don’t think its fair to mock people who have a site, often it’s down to the web designers.


Ok, so what’s next? Ok, well this one really depends on your type of business, and it is not a tip for every business sector to take out. But good quality, striking images that appear on your homepage can really capture peoples attention and get them looking further through the site. It’s a proven fact.


So, now after you’ve taken into account all of these proven facts on making sites “sticky” - that means people going back to them, staying on them, repeat business etc etc - Once you’ve taken into account all of this information, go and have a look at your website (and if you don’t have one www.behigher.co.uk). If it covers all the bases, then well done! Fantastic! If not, it might be worth having a chat with your web designer and mentioning what made them do it the way they did, on what success basis and why?


Well, I hope that is good information from my “bonus” blogg posting this week, I am really enjoying writing here, but wish a few more of you would come forward with your comments! If you do suffer from shyness, mail me at info@behigher.co.uk we’re always happy to help where we can.

Tom,