Planning to redesign your web site? Always good to hear! Here are a few tips for improving your web site, even on a limited budget.

1. Keep your logo in the top left corner, linked to the main url.

It seems so simple. But there are still many sites that do not practice this. More and more usability and user-preference studies are showing that visitors expect your logo (or company title) to be in the top left hand corner. If your brand is the first thing the visitor sees, they understand where they are from the beginning. The brand then leads the visitor into your core content and coaxes them through the web site in a natural reading flow: top-to-bottom, left-to-right.

2. Develop a clear subheading for the top of your home page.

By subheading, I mean a short, summarized description about your business. Think about your specialty, your industry focus, and state it. I recommend including this in plain text (not a graphic) somewhere in your heading – preferably as the first line of text in your code following your logo. A good placement is in the top right corner or beneath your main navigation menu. What does this do? It tells a human visitor right away what the web site is about – so they know they found the right business for their needs and are interested in reading further; it gives the search engines some strong key phrase food.

Here is an example of a strong subheading:
Custom Window Dressing Services for Hotels and Universities

3. Include geographical words whenever applicable.

If you are focused on serving a specific city, state, country, or any region, you should mention it. This will help fine tune the content in your web site and better feed the right information to search engines. In turn, you will receive more targeted visitors.

Here is an example of a good subheading when location is brought into the picture:
Austin Texas Corporate Litigation Services
Austin Furniture Restoration Services

Location can also be nicely incorporated in contact information. Which brings us to #4…

4. Post your contact info in highly visible spots.

Customers tend to get very frustrated when they can’t find your phone number or email address. They have a question, but they have to dig around for several minutes to ask you? Don’t count on that level of patience. Most visitors leave a site within a few of seconds if they don’t see what they want. Great places to include your key contact info:

• in the top right corner of your web page heading
• in a horizontal divider bar beside your menu links
• repeated within the content of your home page and other pages
• in a colorful, eye-catching box in your content or in a left hand side bar
• repeated in the footer near your copyright statement