With just around 60% of small businesses having any web presence at all, having a website puts you ahead of a lot of your competitors. Knowing what your customers want to see is another thing entirely. If this is your first site, you might need some web design tips for your homebuilding business.

Great web design can tell your potential clients that you know about design and user interactivity. This is an essential in the homebuilding business. If you understand space, color, and design, you show your customers that you will apply the same aesthetics in homebuilding.

Your website is an extra employee, a sort of brand ambassador greeting the world 24/7. Try out these web design tips for your homebuilding business to make sure your web presence meets the quality of your work.

1. Optimize Your Title

While you might try not to judge a book by its cover, search engines and clients will judge your pages and posts by their title. Your title tags don’t appear on your site but they are important tags that allow search engines to match you with user searches.

Rather than just writing “Homepage” or “Company X”, try “Company X, industrial equipment supplier in Anytown, New York”.

Your title tag should give your company name, the type of business that you have, and your location. Search engines will use this information to ensure that you get matched to relevant searches in your area.

2. Optimize Your URLs

You might think that visual design is everything in web design, but how you make yourself known through users is all about how you match in search results.

You need to ensure that your blog posts, event pages, and secondary pages on your site all have URLs that read clearly to visitors. When search engines return results, they will give potential visitors an idea of how relevant your page is to them

Some pages will lead to URLs that look like “http://CompanyX.com/blogpost=839854”. This gives your potential visitors no idea of what’s on the page. A better URL would read “http://CompanyX.com/ten-tips-for-DIY-projects-using-product-y”. Custom web development can ensure you’re able to take advantage of custom URLs.

If you’ve got a great URL and a headline that matches what keywords users will be searching for, you’ll be ensuring your pages get lots of hits.

3. Organize Your Menus

Search engines and users alike need to be able to navigate your site with ease. That’s why menu organization is near the top of web design tips for your homebuilding business.

Search engines use web crawlers to index sites across the web. That’s how they can return so many results in a fraction of a second. They’ve already gone through every page’s menu system and page organization to figure out what the keywords and phrases relevant to a search could be.

When users visit your site, they also want to see an organized site. Rather than ten thousand different menu options, keep it to around 5. Keep your submenus simple as well. When possible, obey the three-click rule.

If it takes more than three clicks to get to anything on your site, it’s too complicated.

4. Optimize Your Images

All of your images should be high quality. But that doesn’t mean they have to be 10+ MB each. Your images can be both small enough to load quickly and high-quality enough to look great on every device.

Hire a professional photographer to take photos for your site. Rather than relying on stock photography, get some unique photos of your products, services, and staff. Stage a few photos with friends and relatives to show off what your services can do.

Keep photo width to match the width of your page. If your page is 800px wide, don’t upload a bunch of photos that are 4000px wide. That recalculation will slow down browsers, slowing download times, which will hurt your search results and have users looking for another site within a few seconds.

5. Let It Breathe

While web design of the 90s was a chaotic mix of showing off how much you could do with a page, contemporary design is much more grown up. Web design in 2018 displays much more white space, short, easy to scan text blocks and colorful images. One of the most important web design tips for your homebuilding business is to give your user some room to breathe.

Sites that are more than five years old tend to feel cramped and cluttered, like the designer tried to include everything on one page.

Use parallax design techniques to separate space visually. Don’t be afraid to make your first page scrollable. Keep your text short and sweet.

Once people are interested, you can add longer texts. Leave the exposition for the most engaged customers.

6. Write A Great Blog

Including a blog is a great way to engage visitors, get more hits from search engines, and increase your brand’s authority. Write about what you know within your industry. Use an easy to read format and make it shareable.

Search engines love sites that offer a steady stream of fresh content and your site will be rewarded handily for regularly updating your blog. Write a bunch of content all in one go and have it scheduled to be released once or twice a week. Share it on your social media profile so that you can help it go viral.

No matter what kinds of products you’re writing about, you can always link to encourage your visitors to read more. Linking to other sites also builds your brand authority.

With your blog, you can stay on top of industry trends without having to rewire your whole website every few months. You can give your customers a chance to engage with you and participate in the conversation. As more users comment on and share your articles, your brand authority will increase and you’ll see even higher rankings.

7. Design Mobile First

Since more users are moving toward mobile devices for browsing to search for products and services, you need to be where customers are. Rather than retrofit an old site or start with the shrinking audience of desktop users, start by designing mobile first.

This will ensure that your site is easy to use on a mobile platform, looks great, and stays simple to navigate.

There Are More Web Design Tips For Your Homebuilding Business

This is only the tip of the iceberg when we’re talking about how to get traffic to a good looking site. There are plenty of other web design tips for your homebuilding website that can help you to ensure people stay connected and loyal to your company.

For even more tips, check out our other guides on web design.