10 Keys For A Great Website Design For Your Business
A good website design can help you attract more clients, and a great website can help you retain existing clients.
A great website design should be easy to navigate, simple, and clear. When designing your website, the design of your pages should always come before the design of your logo and branding.
With this article, you will be able to easily design your website, whether it is for a small business or a large corporation.
Here are 10 keys to a great website:
1. Purchase Secure, Scalable Website Hosting With Good Tech Support
A website host (website hosting provider) is a company that offers the technology and services necessary for a website to be viewed on the internet.
You connect your domain name to your hosting provider so that when users visit your website address, they are shown the website that you store on your hosting account.
Hosting services can cost anywhere between $2 to $100+ per month, depending on the kind of technology and support you choose. You can usually get a discount if you purchase a yearly plan as opposed to a monthly plan.
Some popular website hosting companies:
2. A Good Domain Name
Your domain name, also known as your website address, is often the entry point to your site.
It is important that it makes a good impression for usability purposes, as well as for search engine optimization (SEO).
Here are some tips for coming up with an optimal domain name:
- Make it easy to spell – Try not to use slang.
- Keep it as short as possible – The shorter it is, the easier it is to remember and type correctly.
- Use the proper domain extension – Try to always make it a .com domain name (as opposed to .net, .co, etc.) unless it is more appropriate to use another extension, such as .gov, .edu, or .org.
- Avoid numbers and hyphens – They are hard to remember and less elegant and memorable than word-only domain names and maybe misunderstood when vocalizing the domain name.
- Ensure it is memorable – With so many websites on the internet, it is important that your website name is catchy so people will remember how to access it in the future.
- Research the domain name – Google it to see if a similar website address already exists online.
- Check if the price is right – Determine if you can purchase your desired website address at a reasonable price since most good domain names are taken and will need to be bought from the current owner.
Here are a couple of examples where you can purchase a domain for your website:
3. Prominently Display A Clear Description Of Your Business
It is important to let people know who you are and what you do right away so they don’t feel confused when they visit your small business website.
Make sure your main homepage banner (also known as a “hero section”) and subsequent banners are visual representations of your services, and also that you have an introductory text near the top of the page that describes who you are and what you do.
Additionally, make sure both your main and footer navigation menus have “About Us” page links easily accessible so people can click them and read more about your business in-depth.
4. Implement The Best Content Management System
A content management system (CMS) is a software program or application that is used to create and manage digital content.
A good CMS will help you maintain your site, and you don’t need much technical knowledge to use it. You should choose a CMS that is designed for your unique needs; different systems are used for different reasons, such as user-friendliness, extensibility, and budget.
The following are some popular systems with descriptions of their strengths and weaknesses.
- WordPress – WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS.
It has a vast, active support community and many useful plugins to extend the functionality of your site. WordPress is also free and relatively simple to install.
I normally recommend that small businesses use WordPress to create their websites, due to its flexibility and extensibility.
It must be noted, however, that WordPress’s biggest weakness is security – because it is so popular, hackers target it the most. Your WordPress site needs to be regularly maintained and secured so it is not hacked.
Also, it is difficult to secure every single third-party plugin, so keeping your WordPress site secure must be an ongoing commitment through various best practices (checking to see if your plugins have been updated within the past few months, making sure it is a plugin provided in the official WordPress repository, deleting unused plugins immediately, etc.).
- Wix – Wix is very user-friendly. It offers a monthly, and annual, subscription and includes many features.
Wix is also a drag-and-drop builder – you can freely drag and drop elements anywhere on the page. The learning curve to using Wix is even shorter than other platforms, if you need to publish a site quickly, this may be your best option.
Wix has a lot more templates than other platforms to choose from, but once you choose a template, you must stick with it or be forced to completely rebuild your site.
- Shopify – Shopify is another all-in-one hosting CMS platform. You won’t need to buy hosting, install any software, or manage things like updates and backups.
It has a straightforward drag and drop interface. It supports in-store sales, which is great if you have a physical store as well as an online one.
However, the cheapest plan is $29/month. The most expensive is $299/month and includes more features. You get a discount for paying for a year upfront.
5. Choose A Good E-Commerce Platform
If you plan on selling goods and/or services through your website, you will need the right technology to do so. (In case that you do not currently sell anything, you may want to consider doing so since e-commerce could potentially increase your profits.)
Whenever decide to allow users to financially transact with you online, you will need to choose the right platform for your business model.
Here are some popular small business e-commerce platforms:
- WooCommerce – WooCommerce is one of the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms – it can turn your WordPress website into an online store.
Like WordPress, there are many plugins available, and it attaches to WordPress, which makes it extremely flexible.
There are many free and premium themes pre-built for WooCommerce. If you are not tech-savvy, you will most likely need a web designer to help you set it up and use it. WooCommerce also offers a very high amount of capabilities and scalability that your small business might need.
- Wix – Wix actually has a Shopify extension which is very user-friendly.
You will have to upgrade your Wix account and subscribe to Shopify in order to use it.
- Shopify – Shopify is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that allows you to create and customize an online store, and to manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping.
It is not a WordPress extension like WooCommerce – it is a standalone platform that is hosted on the Shopify server – so if you have the main website, your e-commerce site would technically be separate from that.
You can link to your Shopify account from your regular website built with WordPress, Drupal, Wix, etc. unless your main website has a Shopify integration plugin.
6. Optimize Your Small Business Website For Search Engines
SEO is a set of practices you apply to your website to ensure search engines index and rank your website appropriately and then show it to search engine users.
Once your website is “crawling” by search engines, it competes with websites that have similar content. The better your website design and content are, the higher your site will show up on search engine result pages.
SEO mainly includes the following practices:
- Keyword research and implementation
- Fast loading speed
- security and installing an SSL certificate
- Having a mobile-friendly site
- Having lots of positive reviews online (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.)
- Using internal links throughout your site to keep people clicking and reading
- Using social media to link to your site (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.)
7. Create An Interesting, Memorable, And Engaging Website User Interface
Make sure your small business website interface leaves a positive impression that drives results.
You can do so by implementing the following suggestions:
- Use beautiful graphics and easy-to-read fonts.
- Making sure your graphics are compressed and optimized for fast loading. If your website is slow, search engines like Google will penalize your ranking.
- Stay consistently on-brand throughout your website design.
- Research the competition to see how they have designed and optimized their websites; implement similar componentsto your website design that will work for your small business website.
- Research your target audience to see what they want from your site and make it easy for them to accomplish it.
- Design an intuitive navigation system that allows users to get to the pages they need quickly.
- Publish easily accessible contact information.
- Incorporate obvious call-to-actions (especially “buy now” buttons).
- Create pages that are standard for small business websites, such as:
- Home
- About us
- Products/Services (with descriptions and visually appealing images)
- Contact us
- Terms of use (the online contract governing how users can use your site)
- Privacy policy
- Additional pages relevant to your specific small business
8. Install Webmaster Tools
Make use of vital data to help you analyze traffic and site performance by installing Google Analytics and Google Search Console (both preferably via Google Tag Manager).
9. Regularly Create And Publish Quality Content
Both content quantity and freshness are important to search engines, so it’s important that you create a plan to publish quality articles and/or blog posts on your site and on external sites that link to your site.
If you want to rank highly in search engine results and encourage people to return to your site again and again, you will have to update your website with new and relevant content as frequently as possible.
10. Implement A Website Maintenance Plan
A website shouldn’t be created and then allowed to grow stale. In order to have a successful website that ranks well in search engines and doesn’t get hacked, you need to make sure it is properly maintained.
Here are some tips to create a small business website maintenance plan:
- Check Webmaster Tools data at least once a month and have any vital errors emailed to you in real-time.
- Use traffic data to learn more about your audience so you can better cater to them.
- Make sure all software is always up to date.
- Run security scans so you know your website is clean of malware and hasn’t been hacked.
- Find on-trend and effective ways to market your business online.
- Continue to check out your competition from time to time to see what they are doing with their online presence and see if what they’ve done can work for you as well.
- Make sure your website is backed up
Finally
As you can tell after reading this article, creating a great small business website may not be as simple as you first thought.
However, if you follow the keys in this article, your small business will have an excellent chance of succeeding in the online marketplace.
If this article helped you, you learned new things you didn’t know before about website design?
Please, write in the comment section below!
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