Having a small business website is a convenient way to supplement your current income or make a full-time living online. However, if your web design is sloppy and less than acceptable, consider your online business as virtually invisible on the web.

Bear in mind that site monetization depends, among other factors, on hits and visitors on your website that convert to sales. An uninteresting web page can’t expect to hold its visitor long enough for them to read your unique selling proposition (USP) that can lead them to buy.

With the slew of small business websites dotting the Web today, new visitors can only spend an average of 15 seconds on each website and if your web design can’t hold their interest to for them stay longer, then they move on and you lose a potential sale. Below are some web design tips and tricks to create attention-grabbing business websites.

Visual appeal

Most accustomed web surfers can take in a whole website’s impression at a glance. Their trained eye can instantly discern if a site is well-designed or haphazardly put together. It is in cases like this that a website should make a good impression at first glance in order for visitors to look at it in detail.

A visually-attractive website says that it was designed with its customers in mind. Start by finding a picture that relates to your site’s general keywords and theme. You can use, for example, a photo of a litter of irresistibly cute puppies to illustrate your puppy care products website.

A picture can express a thousand words and if you’re selling Miami beachfront properties, a photo of a bungalow with the ocean as a backdrop will drive your point through without requiring your visitor to read the long descriptive text.

Catchy slogan

To perk up attention, create a slogan that describes your website’s content to your customers in a few words. A catchy slogan can be, for instance, “Affordable Miami Beachfront Dream Homes”. Underneath, you can optionally add a sub-slogan in smaller type that says, “Dream it. Live it.” Slogans are actually made up of just a few words but they can bring the money in if imaginatively conceived.

Shades and color

Color and shades captivate the eye. Use this web design tool, either subtly or prominently, to attract your customer’s interest when you want to emphasize a point.

What’s more, you can employ shading to group certain areas of your website together. If you have a page, for example, which compares your products to other brands, group your product’s features together through background shading to make it prominent.

Proper spacing

The correct use of spaces and margins (right, left, top and bottom) can allow your web pages to “breathe” and make your site look less restrictive. Similarly, a space following every paragraph breaks large and cumbersome blocks of text into smaller, easily assimilate bits of information.

Headings and subheadings

It is important to use headings and subheadings to help your visitors browse through your content and easily locate the topic that interests them. These make your web page appear more organized and likely to be crawled by search engines.

Don’t forget that search engines love content and you should set that as your main concern.

Having a well-designed business website will keep visitors in your site longer and more often. Just be sure to give them a good first impression because, as we all know, first impressions are the ones that last.

Web templates can save you time and money. If you want to get a jump start on your website design, there’s no fast way to get up and running quickly. Even experienced web designers use some kind of homemade web template to put the required web pages and layout in place.

If you are starting from scratch on your design, reviewing different colors, layouts, and navigation methods of several different web templates can give you some good ideas. You make like the colors from one, the layout from another, and some graphics from somewhere else.

When choosing any website templates, look and feel are important, but the technical aspects can impact both the user and search engine features. You often have to look behind most web templates designs to make sure that proper techniques for the user experience and ease of search engine review are also in place.

You only have 3-6 seconds to grab the visitor’s attention, so you better use every feature at your disposal. Lets start with the visitor’s possible reasons for sticking around and reading your message. Here are a few methods that will help you get the visitors attention and convince them to keep reading. These methods should be incorporated into any web template.

Give the visitor instant gratification on subject matter. The area above the fold (top 5 or 8 inches) is prime real estate and you need to have a powerful headline that reinforces the reason they came to your website. Applicable graphics (photos, illustrations, etc.) can help but the written word usually rules in grabbing attention.

Show them the information they want by using meaningful anchor text in menus. Demonstrate at first glance that you have additional information or easy to understand links that revolve around the subject matter with easy navigation. Fancy pull down menus don’t cut it for making any visual impact.

Don’t waste important real estate with a huge graphic that takes up half of the area above the fold. Many website templates waste valuable space with some large graphic. If you look at some of the most popular websites you see that none of them waste that first 6-8 inches of space with huge graphics. Look at Yahoo, Google, MSN, eBay, and others and you’ll see what I mean.

On the technical and search engine side, there are several methods that directly effect your ability to get high index rankings under your keywords or phrases. Although the search engines look at structure and content, they also need your help. You should always make sure that the search engine bots can easily navigate and interpret what your website content is all about.

OK, lets say you did your homework and have decided on the best keywords and phrases for your subject matter. Remember our headline form the above visitor attention example, make sure you include your keyword or phrase and code it with html H1 tag. That tells the search engines you think that is important.

On the graphics you use, especially the first visible one, use the alt text feature to name it using your keyword or phrase. It doesn’t really matter what the graphic is, although you should stick to ones that are related to subject matter anyway, but use the same keywords from the headline.

Create your title and description mega tag so that you use the same keywords that are in the headline, alt text, and best represent your subject matter. Many say that you should start the description and name with the keyword is the best way. Not sure it has to be the first word but it can’t hurt. Make sure that the description makes since to the possible audience too since that’s what they see when doing a search.

Many web templates come with one set of meta tags that are the same for each page. Something to always remember about any web page in your web templates or finished website, each web page should be unique to itself. Always make sure that the meta tags reflect the individual web page, don’t use one set for all web pages. Search engines rank web pages, not websites.

It’s always a good idea to customize any web templates to your particular subject matter, color preference, and layout. You don’t want to look like a twin to someone else’s website to users or search engines. Whenever you start your design, always remember that you are serving two masters. Both the visitors and the search engine bots need to be facilitated for good results.