Small Business Web Design Tips
Starting your website for your small business can be a daunting task, below you will find some simple tips to guide you through the process and hopefully ensure it goes smoothly.
Write Your Own Content
Nobody knows your business like you do, the message you convey immediately on your home page delivers a first impression a potential client has of your business. If your message is clearly written and conveys confidence in the product or service you offer, your prospective client will have confidence in doing business with you. A weak written opening statement on your site can quickly cause traffic to leave your site instead of engaging your visitors, costing you potential business. Also please never copy content from a competitor, you will be risking a penalty in Google for having duplicate content. Write your own content, it may bee painful, but the effort you put in will be well worth it. You can also hire a content writer.
State Your Purpose as a Company Clearly
The opening message of your website should clearly define 3 things in one or two sentences each.
- Who you are as a company?
- What you do as a company?
- Why someone should choose your company? (over a competitor)
You should think of your opening message as your sales pitch. For example, if you were to sit down for a face to face meeting with a potential client to pitch them on your product or service, what exactly would you say? Well put those words into writing and there is your starting point for a strong opening message to your website visitors.
Tell Customers What Benefits You Can Offer Them
Most prospective clients will be focused on learning one thing when they enter your website, any idea what that is? You guessed it, your pricing. They want to know what you charge for your products or services right away. This is why it is crucial to build value immediately on your home page on how you can help or what you can do for them better than any other company. People love to save money, so possibly doing comparisons of competitors and ensuring you clearly identify your niche are ways to convert your visitors to clients.
Use Calls to Action to Generate More Leads
Calls to action not only help convey benefits as discussed above but can also help you with lead generation. Offering a free report, a free coupon or anything else of value in an email signup ensures you get their details and they get something of value in return. This will help you build your email database and then you can eventually move away from the costly advertising that doesn’t work and start doing email marketing which is free and is very effective.
Develop a Page Flow
A website should almost flow like a book. Aside from text running from left to right like a book, the pages of the site should flow like a book. Your Nav buttons are like the table of contents (Home, About Us, Our Services, Pricing, Contact Us). The nav buttons help navigate in the ideal order you want a potential customer go through. First upon the home page you want a compelling message that peaks their interest in your product or service, then the about us page offers credibility showing you are a legit business with a company bio, mission statement and some client reviews. Once they realize you are reputable, then they will go review your services page (or products) page to ensure what you are offering is exactly what they want. Then they go to pricing and lastly the Contact page to fill out an inquiry form asking you to contact them. The book is now done, THE END, they are now your client.
Browse Other Small Business Websites To Get Ideas
If you’re not sure of the content for each of the pages of your site, the best thing to do is to browse other companies in your space. Try to focus on common features of your competitors like free quote lead generation forms on all pages, photo galleries used to display portfolios, chat features and other types of pop ups, ect.
Professional Web Designer vs. Do It Yourself Websites
Many small businesses are limited with a budget when starting out and often want to go the DIY route for their small business website. While some do get through the complicated do it yourself website builders and completely launch their own site, it often looks unprofessional, is not mobile friendly and most importantly not properly optimized for search engines.
Register Your Domain For Your Small Business Website
Over the years we have heard so many nightmare stories about businesses that lost their domain name because the company who built their site registered the domain name in their name. Register the domain in your name so you own it and then if you leave you current web designer, you can easily take the domain with you to a new company. If you have to start over with a new domain it can take months before you see any ranking in search engines compared to a well-established domain which has been around for years.
Choose a Reliable Host
There are also plenty of different hosting companies available. We use only a host who can guarantee a 99.9% up time of our website monthly or our money back. Many hosts do not offer that guarantee and often aside from downtime of your site several times a month, the hosts servers are so overloaded with sites that your site can load very slowly on each page click.
Consider the Future For Your Small Business Website
As your business grows, you obviously want your site to grow with it. A Content Management System based site can ensure with limited knowledge, you can add to your site as new services or features of your products become available. A CMS will allow you to easily add news articles, promotional pages and so much more preventing you from being limited like the DIY sites are famous for.
The above are some of the most critical factors you should be paying attention to when considering a website for your small business. At Internet Solutions For Less, our small business web design packages offer flexibility in pricing and features. You can start out basic and grow as your small business grows. Contact us today for a small business web design quote.