5 Things You Need to Know When Building Your Small Business Website
As a small business owner, you know how important a well-designed website is for reaching your prospective customers and increasing sales. Not sure what to pay attention to when building your small business website? Create your site with these five things in mind, and you’ll be off to a good start.
1. User Experience is Most Important
User experience (UX) involves the overall impression people get from interacting with your website. While UX is made up of a lot of different things, user interface (UI), or how visitors interact with your website, is one of the most important.
A well-designed small business website should be useful, easy to navigate, and accessible. To help with this, think about where you usually look when you visit a website. You probably expect a search bar and menu to be at the top of the page, and important links like FAQs or an About section at the bottom of the page. Features like a search bar, a menu that displays your main pages, and simple, descriptive URLs will help website visitors understand your site and create a positive user experience.
2. Design from the Customer’s Perspective
You know everything there is to know about your company, but chances are the people who visit your website won’t know very much. When designing your site, pretend that you’ve never heard of the business before. What questions would you have? What information would be most important to you? What page hierarchy (the grouping of individual web pages) would make sense to you? And most importantly, why should they visit your website?
Your site should paint a very clear picture of your company’s identity. Otherwise, it can be easy to forget important information that will leave website visitors confused and unlikely to return to the site. Try to get an outside perspective on your website from someone who isn’t directly involved in your business. They can help point out unanswered questions, confusing design features, or navigation issues that you might not notice. There’s also a huge difference between what a consumer-facing website looks like and a site that caters to other businesses. Consider your target audience and design your website accordingly.
3. Align Your Website with Your Brand
As one of the first touchpoints in a customer’s journey, your website should be your biggest brand ambassador! You want people to leave your website with a good understanding of who you are, what you do, and what your business is about. The tone of the website’s copy, the color scheme, and other visual and design elements should reflect your business’s identity.
Emotions are powerful motivators that can drive decision-making. Building a brand entails cultivating strong emotional connections with customers. Want to be perceived as a fun and quirky brand? Try using orange to evoke playfulness or yellow to show youthfulness. Want to be seen as formal and authoritative? Keep your tone professional and confident in your blog posts. Consistency is important too — while you don’t want every page on your website to look exactly the same, you should use a uniform color scheme and font to help users get a clear idea of your business.
4. Keep Responsiveness in Mind
A responsive website is one that displays properly no matter what device visitors are using. With smartphone use only increasing, your website needs to be built to accommodate both mobile and laptop users.
Page loading speed is an important factor — these days, users expect web pages to load almost instantly. A slow site can impact conversion rates, create a negative impression of your business, and cause visitors to leave your website. Factors like image and video size can impact page speed, but you can optimize these elements to decrease load time and help keep people on your website. Not all users have the same internet connection quality, so don’t put images and videos with huge file sizes that can drastically affect your website responsiveness.
5. Prioritize Quality Content
You have a well-designed, informative, and visually appealing website that does a good job introducing people to your small business. Now you can relax, right? Well…not quite. If you want your website to keep getting traffic, you need to maintain it with frequent, targeted, high-quality content. Blog posts, product articles, and other content that’s relevant to your target customers will help people find your website and drive sales. Case studies and campaign reviews let potential customers know how you conduct your services that can help them in their decision making. Consider using an informative, high-value content piece like a how-to guide to collect email addresses and grow your lead list.
While creating your small business website can be a confusing process, it doesn’t have to be impossible! Building it with the user in mind, aligning it with your brand, and optimizing it with good content and a responsive design can help people find your business and drive growth.
