This is a tricky question that covers a whole lot of ground. In order to have a fabulous website for your business, you first need to understand a bit about what makes a site great. I’ll go over the basics of what will make or break your website.

Attractive Design

This one is the hardest to quantify since each person considers something different of attractive design. But all good designs have a few things in common:

Professional Look
Imagine heading off to a 2-hour meeting with a new lawyer. When you walk in, he’s wearing sweat pants and looks like he hasn’t showered in a week. Would you trust him to do a good job for you? An unprofessional website does for you what sweatpants do for your lawyer – destroys credibility. Professionalism is a big part of business. Make sure your website looks as professional as you are.

Plan a Color Scheme

There should be a definite, unified color scheme. You should choose several colors (we suggest two or three) and use those throughout your site for special elements such as buttons, icons, and graphic highlights. This helps to keep each page feeling like a part of the whole.

Make It Skimmable
You should be able to skim a page to find what you want. Titles should be bigger or a different color than your paragraphs, and content should be divided into boxes or sections by what’s what. This keeps people from feeling overwhelmed when looking at a page with a lot of information on it.

Navigation
People won’t stick around your site for long if they can’t find what they’re looking for. Make sure your menus are easy to find and the menu titles are descriptive. Make them consistent – if you have a section menu on the right hand side of one page, make sure it’s in the same spot on every other page. Your links should all be a different color (and possibly underlined) as well, to make it easy for people to skim a page and find out where they want to go.

Homepage
Keep in mind: the most important items should appear first. Your best-selling requested product or service should be prominently featured in the top half of the page. You should have an easy-to-find link for contact information, and possibly display your phone number there as well. Give people a sentence or two about who you are or what you do. And keep it simple: you want to direct people to the information they’re looking for. And if that link has a catchy slogan or graphic with it, so much the better.

Everything Should Work
There’s nothing worse than filling out a contact form, only to realize that it doesn’t work. Or that the business’ phone number has been changed since their website was last updated. Make sure you test all forms, photo galleries, and links. A working website is a happy website.