If you are a small business owner, having a great website is necessary for your business’ success. In order to succeed, your website should be informative and engaging. If you are looking to build a new startup website or improve your current site, this article will prove useful to you! Below are some tips you can use on how to build a great small business web design.
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Secure a Good Domain Name
First things first, secure a good domain name. Your domain name is also known as the website address. It is considered as the entry point to your site. It is important to make a good impression for usability purposes, and also for search engine optimization or SEO.
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Purchase a Secure, Scalable Web Hosting with Excellent Tech Support
A web host (or web hosting provider) is a company that provides the technology and services needed for a website to be viewed on the internet. You must connect your domain name to your web hosting provider so that every time users visit your web address; they see your website stored on your hosting account.
Hosting services can cost around $2 to $100+ every month, depending on what type of technology and support you decide on. You can get discounts if you purchase a yearly plan instead of a monthly one.
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Provide a Clear Description of Your Business
If you’re trying to grow your business, it is important to let people know who you are and what you do so they won’t feel confused when they visit your website. Make sure your main homepage banner (also called the ‘hero image’) and succeeding banners visually represent the services you offer, and also that you have an introductory text blurb near the top of the page describing who you are and what you do.
In addition, make sure your main and footer navigation menus both have accessible ‘About Us’ page links so people can click them and have a deeper understanding of your business.
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Use the Best Content Management System
To build a great small business web design, you need to utilize a content management system or CMS. A CMS is a software program or application used in creating and managing digital content. A good CMS will help you in maintaining your site, and you don’t even need a lot of technical know-how to use it. Choose a good CMS that suits your needs. Different systems are used for different reasons, such as budget, extensibility, and user-friendliness.
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Opt for a Good E-commerce Platform
If you have plans to sell goods and/or services through your website, you need to have the right technology to make this possible. If you are not currently selling anything, you may want to consider this idea since e-commerce can potentially increase your profits. If you eventually decide to allow site users to financially transact with you through your site, you need to choose the right platform for your business model.
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Make Your Web User Interface Memorable, Engaging, and Interesting
Make sure your small business web design interface leaves a positive impact that drives results. This can be achieved with the help of the following suggestions:
- Using interesting graphics and easy-to-read fonts.
- Making sure your graphics are compressed and enhanced for faster loading. If your website loads slowly, search engines like Google will lower your search engine ranking.
- Look into the competition and find out how they have developed and improved their websites; apply the same components that you believe will work for your small business website.
- Find out who your target audience are and what they want from your site, then make it easy for them to accomplish it.
- Keep your small business website design consistent with your branding.
- Create an intuitive navigation system that allows users to get to the pages they want immediately.
- Provide contact information
- Include obvious call-to-actions such as ‘buy now!’ buttons.
- Include pages that are customary for small business websites such as:
- Home
- About Us
- Sitemap (for SEO)
- Products/Services Page (with descriptions and images)
- Privacy policy
- Other pages related to your small business
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Improve you Small Business Website for Search Engines
SEO makes sure search engines index and rank your website appropriately and show it to search engine users. Once search engines ‘crawl’ your website, it competes with other websites with similar content. How do you stand out from the competition? Simple, make sure your web design and content is better and your site will rank higher on search engine result pages.
SEO generally includes the following practices:
- Fast loading speed
- Keyword research
- Optimized website code
- Improved security and installing an SSL certificate; SSL is the standard security technology that guarantees safe exchange of data between web servers and browsers.
- Mobile-friendly site
- High-quality backlinks that lead to your site
- Positive online reviews (Google, Facebook, Yelp, and etc).
- Internal links all over your site to keep people reading and clicking on your site
- Using social media to link to your site (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and etc.).
SEO is considered a very important process that can make a huge difference between showing up on the first page of search engine results pages (resulting to large amounts of page traffic) or page 400 (resulting to zero page traffic).
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Publish Quality Content Regularly
Quality content and freshness are both equally important to search engines, so it’s important to regularly publish quality articles or blog posts on your sites as well as on external sites that link to your site. If you want to improve your ranking in search engine results and entice people to your site again and again, you have to keep your website updated with new and appropriate content regularly.
Make sure your content uses relevant, on-brand tone that people will love and enjoy reading.
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Keep Your Website Well-Maintained
One does not simply create a website and then allow it to just grow stale. In order to have a successful, high-ranking, secure website, you need to make sure it is properly maintained.
