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.

1. Don’t start a layout without having a concept/idea.

Before starting, ask yourself: who am I designing this for? What are the target’s preferences? How am I going to make this better than the client’s competition? What will be my central “theme”? Would it revolve around a certain color, a certain style? Will it be clean, grungy, traditional, modern etc?

2. Don’t obsess over the trends.

Shiny buttons, reflections, gradients, swirls and swooshes, grungy elements – all these are staples in contemporary web design. If you make everything shiny, you will end up just giving your visitor an eye sore. When everything is an accent, nothing stands out anymore.

3. Don’t make everything of equal importance.

Egalitarianism is desirable in society, but it doesn’t apply to the elements on your web page. If all your headlines are the same level and all the pictures the same height, your visitor will be confused. You need to direct their sight to the page elements in a certain order – the order of importance. One headline must be the main headline, while the others will subordinate. Make one picture stand out (in the header, maybe) and keep the others smaller. If you have more than one menu on the page, decide which one is the most important and attract the visitor’s view to it. Create a hierarchy.

4. Don’t repeat yourself too much and too often.

It’s easy to get tricked into reusing your own elements of design, especially once you got to master them to perfection. But you don’t want your portfolio to look like it was created for the same client, do you? Than you have to visit www.great-links-toyour-website.com Try different fonts, new types of arrows, borders styles, layer effects, and color schemes. Find alternatives to your go-to elements. Impose yourself to design the next layout without a header. Break your habits and keep your style diverse.

5. Don’t disregard the technology.

If you’re not the one coding the website, talk to your programmer and find out how the website will be implemented. If it’s going to be all flash, then you want to take advantage of the great possibilities for the design and not make it look like a standard HTML page. On the other hand, if the website will be dynamic and database-driven, you don’t want to get too unconventional with the design and make the programmer’s job impossible.

6. Don’t mix and match different design elements to please your client?

Instead, offer your expertise: explain how different elements look great in a certain context but don’t work in another one or in combination with other elements. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t listen to your client. Take into account all their suggestion, but do it to their best interest. If what they suggest doesn’t work design-wise, offer arguments and alternatives.

7. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.

Being creative is in your job description, but don’t try to get creative with the things that shouldn’t change. With a content heavy or a portal-style website, you want to keep the navigation at the top or at the left. Don’t change the names for the standard menu items or for things like the shopping cart or the wish list. The more time a visitor needs to find what they are looking for, for more detail www.instant-audio-mastery.com then more likely it is they will leave the page. You can bend these rules when you design for other creative – they will enjoy the unconventional elements. But as a general rule, don’t do it for other customers.

Now let’s assume that this web page belongs to a site that sells products online. The very fact that half the users cannot even see the page, translates into losses worth half the amount straightaway (perhaps, even more!) Hence we present here a blend of different creative skills & technical prowess – and one is no less important than the other.

In the following lines, we have jotted down a few points that we noticed during our observation on online sites which are important from the point of view of web designers. Some of them may be taken with a pinch of salt; for it is not possible to please everyone every time. But most of them are simple enough to be used as a rule of thumb.

1. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. A picture file, alas, is also almost as big. Images, no doubt, enhance the look of a page, but it is not advisable to go overboard in stuffing your page with a truckload of images. Most net-surfers use a dial-up connection and the average time to load a page should be no longer than 5 seconds. If it’s longer, the surfer will most probably click away elsewhere. So, within this time, all the images on a page must be loaded as well. So, as a rough yardstick, keep the aggregate page size less than 30k.

Another important point to note is that each file on the page requires a separate HTTP request to the server. So a lot of small images – even if they do not add up to a lot in terms of bytes – will slow down the loading a lot.

Even when you must use images for navigation, please give a second thought to the users who will not be seeing those jazzy, fantastic & truly amazing buttons that you spent hours to design. Yes, we are talking of the ALT text attribute of the IMG tag. Do not forget to provide an Alternate Text for each image that you use for navigation. (It may be left blank for certain images that are purely for aesthetic reasons, but let that be an exception, rather than the rule.) Though not obviously apparent, ALT text can help such users immensely.

Modern browsers offer users a choice to turn off images. This gives an idea of how troublesome the unwanted images could be.

A couple of more attributes that make your pages load faster are the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes. Without these, the browser must wait for the image to download since it cannot know how much space to leave for them!

2. Navigability & functionality come before artistic excellence. It is no use making your site a masterpiece of art if users cannot navigate around it – even after they reach the main page; they have no clue as to how to go where they want to go.

3. Especially common, is a kind of navigation that some people call Mystery Meat Navigation. That means that unless your mouse moves over an image, you have no idea where that link might take you. Only when the mouse hovers do you see the actual link. This is cumbersome because users need to move their mouse all over the place to find out which part is a link and which is not.

4. Follow the K.I.S.S. principle: Keep it simple, stupid!

5. Next is a very important practical suggestion: whenever your whole page is within a TABLE, the page cannot render (i.e., the page does not show on the screen) unless the entire table is downloaded. You might have noticed this on several websites, when there is no activity for a long time, and suddenly the entire page is visible. Hence, to avoid such a situation, what you should do is this: Split the table up into two tables one below the other, and let the top one be a short table that displays just the page header and a few navigation links. So now, immediately upon downloading this part of the page, users can see the page header – and this prepares them for the long wait ahead, as well as keeps them from leaving your site to go to other sites, in case of a slow connection.

6. The ongoing browser wars have left only one casualty – the user. As a word of caution, stay away from all browser-specific functions. Because if a certain feature is supported by one browser, it will most definitely not be supported by another. Where you must use such features, it should not hamper the display of the page in the other browser which does not support such functionality. In other words, your page should degrade gracefully.

7. Creating a new browser window should be the authority of the user only. Do not try to popup new windows to clutter the user’s screen. All links must open in the same window by default. An exception, however, may be made for pages containing a links list. It is convenient in such cases to open links in another window, so that the user can come back to the links page easily. Even in such cases, it is advisable to give the user a prior note that links would open in a new window.

8. Keep in mind the fonts-challenged users too. The ultra-jazzy “Cloister Black MT Light” font that looks so amazing on your machine may well be degraded into plain old Times New Roman on your user’s machine. The reason? He/she does not have the font installed on his/her machine – and one thing’s obvious – there’s nothing you can do about the situation, sitting halfway across the globe from them.

9. Stay clear of out-of-the-way hard-to-find fonts. Use plain vanilla fonts like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, and Courier. If need be, make your jazzy fonts into an image and put that on the page. (And while you’re there, do not forget Tip #1.)

10. A new design trick that is increasingly being used on the web has caught my fancy: It is a very functional navigation bar that guides you across all possible paths within the site.