5 Best Practices for Your Website

For many customers, your home improvement website is their first impression of your business. That’s why it’s important to follow best practices to ensure you’re making a good one. When designing or revamping your website, keep these statistics in mind:

• 71% of businesses in 2023 have a website.
• Visitors form a first impression of your website in 0.5 seconds.
• 75% of people use a website’s design to determine credibility.
• Over a third of users will stop using a website if it’s hard to navigate.
• Website viewers spend 80% of their time looking at the left half of pages.
• The average time spent on a webpage is 54 seconds.

Based on this information, having a great website is more vital than ever, especially for small businesses. Here are 5 best practices for your business website.

• Font Should Be Easy to Read
• Utilize Brand Colors Purposefully
• White Space Is Your Friend
• Show, Don’t Tell
• Don’t Forget Calls to Action

Font Should Be Easy to Read

When it comes to choosing a font, you have a wide field to pick from – almost 200,000. So, what should you look for in your winning font? First, think about your brand and what you want to portray to your audience. As a home improvement contractor, you likely want to convey a friendly, yet professional tone. A voice that your potential customers can trust.

Start with clean serif or sans serif fonts that are easy to read for much of your content. Some good places to start are Optima, Prophet, Proxima Nova, and Roboto. Once you pick your main font, you can select additional pairing fonts to use as an accent. Try to keep this number at three at most, as too many fonts can make your page look cluttered.

To learn more about how to build and brand and how your font fits in, download our FREE brand guide.

Utilize Brand Colors Purposefully

The colors you use within your brand can affect how people feel about your business. For that reason, it’s important to pick the right colors and use them in an effective way on your website. Start with picking a main color – the foundation if you will.

Let’s use Home Depot as an example here. Orange has become synonymous with their brand, making many people think of home improvement whenever they see it. While you may not have the reach they do, the color you use can be just as impactful. Just like your fonts, once you have your main color in place, you can pick secondary colors as accents.

Best practices say to have no more than three colors in your logo, use this same guideline on your website. Having too many colors can not only muddle the brand, but it can also make your website look chaotic, ruining your first impression.

White Space is Your Friend

Coming face to face with a huge block of content can be intimidating. This is especially true to customers who are still in the research phase and just want the main message quickly. If they open your website and see a tower of words, they may just close out of the window.

If you don’t know, white space refers to the empty spaces around the content on your website. There are two types of white space: micro and macro. Micro can be found in between letters, words, paragraphs, and more. Macro refers to larger space including margins, the header, page sections, and more.

Using white space in the right way can make your website more palatable to customers and creates a better experience. It can also help you identify where you want homeowners to focus when they visit your site.

Show, Don’t Tell

When someone visits your website, they have a pain point and want to see if you can help. You need to quickly show them what you do. As a contractor, you can do this through photos, process walkthroughs, how to’s, and more. Remember that people love a narrative, and carrying this into your website makes it easy to follow and provides a better experience.

Another great practice to adapt is to gear a lot of your content towards being educational as opposed to salesy. This will help position your business as an industry expert and help customers view you as a helpful resource in addition to providing a great service.

Don’t Forget Calls to Action

Many websites are missing a key factor to increasing their leads – calls to action. This is what you want people to do when they visit your website. Do you want them to fill out a form? Contact you for more information? Schedule a consultation? A customer can’t do any of these if they don’t know how to do it.

Examples of calls to action include text links, buttons, forms, banners, pop-ups, and more. Use strong action verbs to capture people’s attention. Think phrases like ‘subscribe’, ‘get started’, and ‘schedule now’. Each page can include 2 to 3 of the same call to action, such as scheduling a consultation, that’s located throughout the page. Having more than that may confuse the reader and hinder their overall experience.

These CTAs should pop out from the rest of the page. This could be by color, font, design, etc. The easier a CTA is to identify, the more likely a customer is to use it.

Best Practices for Your Website

Here at Regions | EnerBank, we know how important marketing is to the success of your business. That’s why, as a part of your loan program, you gain access to personalized assets, including website buttons and banners. This allows customers to PreQualify and apply for loans before you even step foot in the door. This helps you to grow your business through better qualified leads! Combined with the best practices for your website that we discussed, your website is built for success.

If you’re interested in joining a loan program, click HERE or fill out the form on this page and a member of our team will be in touch soon.

Don’t forget to check out our brand guideline! It’s FREE to download and can help you build a powerful brand and grow your business.