Website Design and Web Development Small Business Review

November 18, 2008 - Susanlippl.com Web Design Review

Each week we select a website on the world wide web to review the website design and other web development aspects to help both the website owner and you create the best website design for your business!

This week's Website Design Review will be of susanlippl.com a website that sells beautiful artist created dolls.

At first glance, we see this website is most likely a business owner created website design. If that is the case, we believe he/she did a reasonably good job for someone that is not a professional web designer. That said, visitors and customers visiting this web site will easily see that this website is not of professional quality which will negatively affect their confidence in this business.

We see several areas this website owner could improve to make their website design more user friendly, search engine friendly as well as appear more professional.

A common mistake in amateur web design is to make the homepage of the website full of large images or special animated widgets. The problem with doing this is that it makes your homepage take too long to download especially for visitors on slower connections. You want to strive for a homepage size around 100 kb or less. This website comes in at nearly 600 kb which will take about 122 seconds to load on a 56K connection or 37 seconds on a 128K connection. With the average visitor having a threshold of about 20 seconds with feedback, many visitors to this website will leave before it ever finishes downloading.

Other problems we see with this website design are that the button names extend beyond the button graphic and the email button does not fit with the style of the web design. In addition the homepage width requires the user to scroll to the right to see all of the information, a feature most users would find inconvenient.

We would recommend a complete website redesign to fit with the theme of the artist’s dolls. We would also recommend creating a Logo Design and using the logo as an integral part of the web design and of the doll brand. We would reduce the width of the page and file size to conform to generally accepted website practices. Instead of using a mailto address as the method of contact, we would create a contact form for sending inquires to keep the client’s email address from being harvested for spam.

Upon inspection of the HTML coding, we can see there are also problems in the way this website was optimized for search engines. Part of good web design is to create a website that is not only professional and easy to use but also one that is optimized for search engine indexing. If you take a look at this website’s head information you will see that the title of this page is simply “Home” and there is no description offered for this page. In addition, the keywords used are repetitive which will be considered spamming by search engines leading to lower ranking or possible exclusion from being listed.

To fix this, you want to create a title that contains your most important keywords, but that is no more than 67 characters in length. You should always include a description using your keywords, but it should also be enticing for your target audience to visit your site. You want to keep your description around 150 characters in length and both your title and description should be unique for each public page of your website. Keywords are not necessary in a website, but our testing has shown that they do make a small impact. That said, if you are going to include keywords, you should be sure to only use keywords that you use on your page and never repeat a single word more than 3 times in your keyword meta tag. Remember, if you are using photos on your site do not forget to use your ALT tags effectively. You can use keywords that can help in placement and also allow your vision impaired visitors to better experience what your company offers.

Many businesses make the mistake of attempting to save money by trying to be everything for their company from the CEO to the Account and even the web designer. However, in the long run this only costs the business more money due to oversight or lost customers. If your small business involves making dolls for example, then you should put your full attention and effort into what you do best, making the best dolls for your customers. Then let the true CEO in you come out and let other professionals do what they do best. By hiring a professional web design company you can be confident your business and talents will be professionally showcased to the world bringing faster growth and increased revenue.

For less than the price of 1 doll sold by this site owner, the entire website could be professionally redesigned to give potential customers a user friendly and aesthetically pleasing experience.

Unique Custom Website Design:  $400
Content Management System:      $500
Contact Form w/Return & Email:   $100
Total Price for a complete and professional website design: $1000

A Content Management System (CMS) is an administrative area that allows the business owner to edit their website content by logging in to an administrative control panel rather than using complicated third party editors.

Want us to review your website design? Click here and give us your details.

Get Started with your FREE no obligation web development quote!