Your business website is one of the best tools that you have at your disposal. The majority of people will search online when they’re trying to find products and it’s essential that, when they find your website, you catch their interest and convince them to stick around. People have a short attention span online and if your website doesn’t impress within the first 30 seconds, they’ll just go elsewhere. In fact, a bad website can make it so difficult for a business to make any sales at all, so it’s important that you’re putting enough time and money into creating an amazing one. If you’re starting a business and building your first website, or you’re just looking at a redesign, these are the features that all good business websites have.
A Good Navigation System
When people enter a site, they don’t want to spend ages clicking around and visiting lots of different pages before they find what they’re looking for. They want to be able to look at the site for a few seconds and then find the section that they need right away, which is why navigation is so important.
A big mistake that a lot of people make is having too many different pages, which makes navigating the website a lot harder.
Try to have as few pages as possible and just include what is actually necessary on there. Good menus with clear categories are important as well, and you need a search function for people that can’t immediately see what they’re looking for on the menu.
You also need to consider the ‘F pattern’ of reading a website. Studies show that people read a webpage in an ‘F’ shape. That means the first place they look is the top left hand corner, that’s where your logo usually goes. Then they’ll scan along the top, usually at the menu, before looking down the sidebar until they find what they need, and then reading across the page.
It’s important that you use these areas wisely and put the most important information in the places where people will read them. Visit https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/ for a more in depth look at the ‘F pattern.’
Visual Stimulus
If people are presented with a big block of text, they’re quickly going to lose interest in your site, which is why visual stimulus is so important. If you don’t have good quality images and videos on the site, people will get bored and leave.
You should feature some professional images of your products on the front page so people can see them as soon as they enter the site. Video demonstrations are also a more interesting way of showing them the benefits of your products. Visit https://setapp.com/how-to/record-edit-share-videos-on-mac for more tips on how to create and edit good quality videos.
If you don’t offer people some sort of visual stimulus and your site is just a big block of text, it appears very daunting and people won’t even bother reading it.
Security
Online security is a massive concern for businesses and their customers, especially if people are sharing their credit card details with you. That’s why it’s so vital that your website has plenty of good security features. If your website doesn’t have HTTPS, for example, users are likely to leave straight away because they don’t want to put their computer at risk.
Any website that doesn’t have these features is not going to benefit your business and it won’t generate sales.