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"If you're a small business owner, your website is the central hub of your company, and it's a pivotal part of your marketing and branding. \nPotential customers visit your site specifically for its content, meaning its appearance and usability are critical to its success and how those users view your company. However, getting your web design wrong can have a negative impact on your business.\nHere are 5 common web design mistakes you must avoid to create a great user experience and grow your bottom line.\n1. Poor Navigation\n\n\n\n\nMany small businesses fail to make navigation a priority, but without careful attention to how people navigate your site, you could unintentionally be creating a frustrating experience for any potential visitor. People visit your site for specific information, and if they cannot find it they will quickly go elsewhere, leaving with the impression that your business is disorganized in more than just its website.\nA good navigation structure should be seamless and will keep visitors on your site longer, which means potentially more readers, subscribers, sales or leads \u2014 whichever is your primary objective. \nWebsite navigation affects both usability and accessibility, so it's important to make it a primary concern. Most websites and blogs use common navigational techniques that are expected by the average visitor. The pages and sections of the site should be easy and logical for visitors to maneuver. Don't make your visitors think about how to navigate your site; it should be effortless and natural. \nThere are several principles you can follow to create an effective navigation structure:\n\nUse icons to aid navigation. They're both visually appealing and easy to use and understand.\nCreate logical groups of related links, with the most important links on the top-level navigation bar and functional (dashboard, account, settings, etc.) and legal (copyright, privacy, terms) located elsewhere.\nProvide location information so users know where they are on any given page and how to proceed to another area of the website. This can be achieved by using Breadcrumb navigation.\n\n2. No Clear Calls To Action\n\n\n\n\nThe fundamental error of many small business websites is the lack of a clear call to action. We've all seen bland small-business brochure websites with nothing but endless descriptive paragraphs. If you aren't leading users to commit to an action (buy a product, contact you or subscribe, for example), then you are losing them. \nDriving traffic to your website is important, but that traffic is useless if your primary call to action is a plain \"click here\" link buried in a sea of text. Call-to-action buttons are a great way to grab the user's attention, and these buttons can be the key to higher conversions. Investing time and consideration into creating successful calls to action can help guide users and address their needs while achieving your own business goals. \nIt's important to keep the following best practices in mind when creating an optimal call to action:\n\nThe design of a call to action can be broken down into 4 simple elements \u2014 size, shape, color, and position. Each plays a vital part in determining how effective the call to action is in directing the user.\nDon't make your users work or think, or they'll leave. It's not that they aren't smart, it's that they want access to information quickly without spending unnecessary time searching for it.\nDon't overdo it with multiple, competing calls to action on every page. Decide what your primary target is and then define a clear objective per page. Your content should have answered, \"What's in it for me?\" and your call to action should now answer, \"What do I do now?\"\n\n3. Color &amp; Contrast\n\n\n\n\nColor and contrast aren't usually high up on the list of priorities for a small business owner when it comes to creating a website. But it should be, because if your website text does not have sufficient contrast compared to its background, people will have difficulty reading your content, especially people with poor vision or color-blindness.\nAside from plain readability, color and contrast are important because they can be used to create visual interest and direct the attention of the user. It can equally be effective in organizing and defining the flow and hierarchy of a page, and it's therefore an essential principle to pay attention to during the design process. Here are some tips:\n\nUsing a free a Color Contrast tool (which conforms to accepted standards) you can easily check to see how the contrast on your website measures up.\nResearch how major sites use color and contrast to improve readability and highlight specific sections, and use this knowledge to experiment with color schemes.\nOne of best ways to enhance contrast is by creating size differences between elements, making some things appear larger than others. This works especially well within a minimal color scheme, and it means you don't have to necessarily rely on color.\n\n4. Content, Content, Content\n\n\n\n\nPeople visit your website for its content, and how that is structured is a huge factor in its success or failure. Unfortunately, an overwhelming number of small businesses get so caught up in overloading the user with information that they overlook how that information is presented. \nMost people do not read unless it's absolutely necessary, and they prefer to scan through information quickly to get to the points of interest. This is why it's so important to establish a strong visual content hierarchy so users can quickly scan your site and sifting through relevant information. A logical content hierarchy also acts as a guide through each page and creates a more enjoyable user experience.\nSo when focusing on your content, it\u2019s best to keep in mind these three tips:\n\nWhite space is possibly the most important factor to consider. It will allow the user to focus on the meaningful content within each section.\nBreak up lengthy pieces of information into digestible blocks of text, utilizing headings, sub-headings, bullets, blockquotes and paragraphs.\nReadable content is important, so use a good line height that is large enough to make content scannable. Margins and letter spacing also need to be taken into consideration.\n\nWhen talking about content, spelling and grammar cannot be underestimated.\n5. Clutter\n\n\n\n\nWe all know at least one small business website that seems to include everything but the proverbial kitchen sink. Many small business owners tend to cram as much as they can onto a single page \u2014 the end result is a busy, cluttered and unreadable page. \nThe more extraneous items there are on a web page, the more unprofessional it looks, and it becomes overwhelming, confusing and distracting for the user. A cluttered website will also affect traffic because visitors won't return if they can't understand or follow the content, which leads to low traffic, a high bounce rate and possibly a poor Page Rank. \nClutter also applies to images. Too many can be a huge distraction and just plain annoying. Images should be used to illustrate, capture attention and guide the user where required. \nFollow these guidelines for a more streamlined visitor experience:\n\nChallenge every item on each page and ask, \"Does it really need to be there? Does it serve a specific purpose? Can I live without it?\"\nThe key is to aid the visitor in finding the information they're looking for, so make sure to differentiate between areas of content, advertisements and promotions. \nPrioritize your content and decide what is the most important to your visitor and potential customer \u2014 and sell it well. \n\nEven the greatest content can become lost in a mess of words and graphics, so de-cluttering is essential. \nThese are just five web design mistakes that many small businesses make. What other mistakes have you noticed on small business websites?\n\nInterested in more Business resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, RBFried"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/04/10/5-web-design-mistakes/>