Design

If you are creating a business website, or looking for ways to improve yours, here are some tips to consider:

1. Make it Clear – exactly what your company does should be available on the upper half of your home page.
2. Describe Benefits – Customers only care what benefits your product or services gives them.
3. Who Are You – Contact information should be easy to find (at least a link from every page, ideally a phone number or email).
4. Customers Need Support – If customers have a problem, support information should be easy to find.  If the information you provide online isn’t enough, give them a way to contact you.
5. Minimize Clicks – Keep the number of clicks to a minimum – for any activity on your site, but especially for buying processes.
6. Purchasing Information – Give customers all the information they need to make a purchase on any product page and/or landing page.
7. Minimize Distractions – Keep flashing, moving and distracting items to a minimum – even if they provide additional information.
8. Design Down – Not everyone has state-of-the-art technology.  Design for the lowest generally accepted standards (which are widely available around the web).
9. Consistent Menus – Menus should be consistent throughout the site to make it easy for customers to find things.
10. Clear Page Titles – Page titles should make it clear where a customer is – use descriptive words for both the web browser window title and for text on the page.
11. Don’t Touch the Back Button – Do not _ever_ disable the back button.  Customers need to be able to back out of wherever they may go.
12. Avoid Popup Windows – unless they provide pertinent information to the current page and are initiated by the customer.
13. Let Your Customer Be In Control – any extra features, such as audio, video, popups, etc. should only activate when a customer clicks on them.  Have you ever been at work when a website suddenly started making annoying sounds out of your speakers?  Don’t do that to your customers.
14. Make it Readable – Fonts need to be easy to read in terms of size, font type and colors – include what color the background is.  Make sure to use high contrast colors to make your text easy to read.
15. Whitespace is Your Friend – Space between items on your page is critical for customers to be able to scan through the page to find what they’re looking for.
16. Consistent Layout – Try to keep the layouts of your pages consistent, so at least your pages look like they belong to the same website.  Navigation and information about where on the site a customer is should be in the same place.
17. Search Should Be Easy – Most people expect a search to be in the upper right region of a page – or at least near the top.

I intend this list to be a work in progress.  What other good design tips should be used on business websites?

(photo by geishaboy500 @ Flickr CC)