5 Tips for Small Business Web Designing
For a small business, your website is a significant part of your brand and plays a big role in your online marketing efforts.
Visitors to your website come searching for something and you need to give them the answers they seek while using your website to sell your product or services. You need to be the solution that they seek.
If your website is not optimally designed, you can easily lose thousands of potential customers that you could easily have gotten from a website that is functioning at optimal quality.
The following tips will help you avoid common mistakes so that your business can grow even faster.
Focus on your target audience
We all understand the importance of meeting deadlines and keeping up with timelines, however, when it comes to website design, you need to place more importance on researching your target customers and understanding your market niche. Your website should be built using this understanding of your target demographics as its core concept.
The little things matter. Researching your target demographic makes you know which is more important, focusing on a mobile optimized website, or targeting a faster loading desktop website. The font styles, sizes and the layout of your website should be designed in a way that is sure to appeal to your target audience. Finding out the part of your website your visitors are more likely to visit and the other subtleties of your website can be incorporated into your web design if you prioritise targeting your specific audience when designing your website.
Flashy or busy website?
Too many times, small businesses seem to think that the flashier, the better. The truth is if your website is designed to be too flashy or too busy it will come across as unprofessional. About 12% of visitors leave a website as soon as they notice flashy content.
Your website should be optimised for efficiency so that your visitors can find what they are looking for as soon as they get to your website.
Also, flashy and busy websites have longer loading times and are not optimised for mobile viewing. These can negatively affect your organic search ranking
Call to action
The call to action is a very subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) psychological nudge that tells your potential customers what to do next. 80% of B2B websites missed out on a customer transaction because they didn’t put a call to action. If you want them to sign up for a service, or subscribe, or buy, then you need to include a very distinctive call to action telling them what to do next.
There should be a collaboration between your website content and your call to action. While your website tells your visitors what you offer, the call to action tells them what to do to get it.
Inaccurate pay for web design services
Whether you hire professional web design services or you decide to go the DIY route, you stand the risk of paying wrongly for the services. Even when you understand that an online presence gives you access to a wider audience, and that a professional web design company can help your online brand a great deal, you may be tempted to go for the big names in web design only.
A big brand may often be an indication of quality and experience (but not always), but how certain are you that the ‘big’ web developer’s services are designed for the intricacies of marketing for small businesses, particularly start-ups with a limited marketing budget?
The trick is to stick to your marketing budget, but do enough research when searching for a web design company so that you get the best value for your money.
Outdated design and inaccurate information on your website
Visitors to your website come because they expect to get the most recent information about your product, services and your business. In a survey, 94% of website visitors said they distrusted a website because the website looked and felt outdated.
Some small businesses forget to maintain and update their website content to reflect the current state of their business and lose potential customers as a result of this oversight.
Try to update your website frequently and if you have a blog, then updating your blog at least once a week allows your website to remain SEO-relevant as well as contain enough information to keep your customers engaged.
Trying to be all-inclusive in your marketing approach and website design
You have to remember that your business has a niche and using an unfocused website design means that you are spreading your resources thinly.
Your website will be much harder to design and end up being a nightmare if you try to accommodate every type of visitor. This is a very inefficient marketing approach.
Try to design your web site for your target audience, that way you have fewer concepts to focus on. This will improve the efficiency of your website and make it easier to have that professional look that every business dreams of, but only a few achieve.
These tips cover a majority of the common pitfalls that businesses come across when designing their website.
