Every company, little or huge, requires a high quality website today in 2020. But simply getting started can be something confusing and frustrating for business owners first entering the technical world of web design and hosting, especially if they have never set up a website before.
It is important to note however that your site is a crucial selling factor for the service you provide in any industry. It will either develop trust among your potential customers or in the worst case, turn them away. This article tells you how NOT to do the latter and gives you actionable tips and advice on what makes a great site.
Creating a company website doesn’t need to be such a difficult process which often seems to be the case. The reasons why developing a site can be difficult to get started are that there seems to be endless themes to buy and unlimited blocks to build. Before you know it, a company’s expenses can sway from a little amount to something easily significant unnecessarily. But it doesn’t have to be this way!
Here’s why you need to consider hiring a specialist website designer. Your site designer will be able to develop a web property for your service which will deliver your message effectively tailored to your market. This in turn will enable you to get more leads and enquiries.
Keep your business objectives and mission statements in mind as you work with your website designer step by step.
Read our 10 ideas below that will help your business’s website get found by search engines and produce the intended result.
1) Mess-Free
A flashy, busy looking site can look impressive but sometimes appears confusing to your audience. Don’t forget the end purpose of your site which is to sell your service and products to acquire customers or generate more quotes and leads. Allow your website visitors to have a seamless web-browsing experience.
2) Search engines must be able to discover your website
Make sure your website is clear from clutter and contains easily digestible content and consists of URLs or pages which aren’t broken. Don’t forget to submit your sitemaps to Google Search Console so the Googlebot can crawl your site and find your pages and posts.
3) Make it mobile-friendly!
A lot of website themes designed for the popular website management system WordPress come mobile optimised already. However, each development project is different and you are likely to come across times where you’re really happy with how something looks on your big screen, but on your Smartphone it looks tiny and has a big horizontal scroll! Your website designer can assist you with that.
4) Design For Leads
Devise ways on how to capture as many leads as possible for your website. You can use tools such as OptinMonster or website popups with contact forms embedded. But at the same time not be so consistent that this irritates your potential customer.
5) Make contact details clear
Sometimes even the biggest, most successful corporations miss this step. Make sure your mobile/landline and contact e-mail are shown clearly on your website. The best places are the top and bottom of each page. Don’t forget to have a ‘CONTACT’ page also which that includes your number and e-mail address again, but also your mailing address (if you have one) for your business, and a map. You can also add opening hours and closing times of your business.
6) Experience must be user-friendly
Whatever you decide (whether that’s working on your site yourself or with a designer), it is important to deliver your message in an easy-to-understand style with simple navigation in menus.
Nothing can be more distracting to a potential customer than a bad site style. Make it so you would find your site easy to use if visiting it for the first time.
7) Showcase products and services well
Several websites show too many products and services on one page and clutter it. If you have a great website design but your products have not been displayed well, your customers will think twice before buying from you.
8) Quick Site load time
Ensure that your web project has the right web hosting and bandwidth to support it. If you use shared hosting then your site speed will be slower than if you decided to choose VPS Hosting. Furthermore, a graphically intense design could eat into your loading time and put off prospective customers. Make sure you are using the latest version of PHP, this will speed up your website.
9) Indexing Your Website
Search engines look for certain elements which determine whether or not they rank your site higher than one of your competitors. Such elements include text in headings such as H1 tags, Img Alt Tags, Meta descriptions and much more. If you are new to these terms, they may sound complex. A site designer will be able to decipher such terms and get to work with them, sparing you of the job.
10) Content
Last but not the least is the relevance of content on your small business website. The more content you have and the more high quality it is, the easier search engines such as Google and Bing will be able to find and index your site.
Research indicates that there are more people viewing web pages with mobile devices instead of laptops and computers. So it is crucial to host a website which loads fast and without hitches. According to experts, a site that loads under 3 seconds is optimal.
Hopefully the above tips will guide you better on how to approach designing for your website, and why hiring a site designer can save you time. If you’re interested in hiring a designer, get in touch today.
