May, 2016 : Important Web Design Tips for Small Business Websites

📅 May 20, 2016 - Small business websites have a reputation for looking outdated and feeling disorganized. You can make sure your business website doesn't fall into that category by using the rules of design as you plan and lay out your website.

Here are some important web design tips for small business websites to follow to ensure an aesthetically appealing website.

Decide: Template or custom design?

First, decide: Will you go with a pre-made template or a custom design? It's pretty simple to decide which you'll choose – if you have web design experience or a team with experience, go with a custom design that only your website has. If you're a beginner, go with an attractive, ready-to-use website template. Design templates range in price from free to very expensive, so do your research when choosing one for your website.

It has to be responsive

Today, most users visit websites on mobile devices with smaller screens and different size ratios than laptops and desktops. If you're not using responsive design – web design that is capable of adapting to a user's own mobile screen to improve functionality and appearance – you're causing every user that opens your website on a mobile device to leave without a second thought. Because most of the nation uses mobile devices to browse online, web design has to be responsive to keep an audience on a website long enough to convert.

Image quality or quantity

This will be a tough decision to make – do you care more about image quality or image quantity on your website? If you try to choose both image quality and quantity, you might end up with an attractive website, but one that takes forever to load and causes customers to click away before your images even display.

Prioritizing image quality means you're willing to have less photos on the website in order to keep page load speeds up while retaining the crisp quality of images. If image quantity is more important – say, on a page with examples of a construction company's past work, then you should drop the image quality a bit in order to keep lots of photos on the page without slowing down the page load speed.

If you keep these things in mind: Template or custom design, the need for responsive design, and the choice between image quality and image quantity, you can make sure your website begins appealing to visitors the moment they land on your page. If you don't prioritize your web design, you could end up with a website that repels users away before they have a chance to find out what your business does. Have any web design tips to add? Leave them in the comments section!