Does My Website Template Stink?

Your business website serves as your company's public face online. If it's not visually appealing, easy to navigate, or informative, it reflects poorly on your company.

Here are a few things to keep in mind while building your business website:

Attractive Visuals

From the colors, to the font face and size, to the overall layout, your site's visual appearance can make or break its effectiveness. For best results, stick to two or three primary colors that fit together well. Using a half-dozen bright, garish colors will distract from your site content and confuse visitors.

Font should be easy to read on-screen (sans serif fonts, such as Arial or Verdana, are best online). Dark text on a light background is easiest to read. Avoid white text on black, and keep your font size at 12 pts. or above for best visibility.

You should also use a few graphics and high-quality photos -- just make sure that they add to your site's content, and don't overdo them.

Navigation/Functionality

If a visitor can't easily find what he's looking for on your site, he's likely to move on to one that's more user-friendly.

Make sure your site's navigation is intuitive and simple, and keep it free of broken links. If your site has a lot of pages, consider using a simple high-level menu and add a link to a site map so visitors can find what they need.

Your business site should also load quickly, which means everything on the page needs to work. If you're using a platform that uses plugins to add functionality to your site, keep them updated and test them regularly to make sure they're not bogging down the page.

Useful, Informative Content

Perhaps the most important aspect of your company's website design, your content should be lively, engaging, and helpful to customers trying to make a buying decision.

Keep your copy brief and well-organized, with short paragraphs and subheads to make everything easily scannable.

Your content should be updated regularly to keep visitors coming back and help with your search engine rankings. You can accomplish this with regular updates or a well-kept blog.

All of your site's content should focus on the visitor, keeping your references to yourself and your company to a minimum (except on the About page). For every piece of copy on your site, ask yourself, "What's in it for my customers?" If the piece doesn't provide value to your customer or visitor, rewrite or cut it.

Search Engine Optimization

Entire books have been written about SEO. While it's an important part of gaining website traffic from search engines, you shouldn't write your site with just SEO in mind.

Write for real, human visitors, not search engine spiders, and you'll likely come up with some natural SEO. Incorporate your important keywords into your copy, but don't force them, and don't stuff your copy with them. Tricks like keyword stuffing may have been effective years ago, but in the age of Panda and Penguin, they'll just earn you a fast track to the very end of search results.

Your company website can be a useful tool, or a waste of your time.

With some planning and thought toward site design and content, you can help make sure it stays useful and helps boost your business.