Designing a website as a small business is easy to do, but hard to do well.
Free software and templates online mean you can create your website for little or no cost – great for your budget. But make sure you’ve got your customers in mind when you design.
In order to connect with, and sell to, your customer, you need to think like your customers.
Visitors to your site need to see more than merely what your products do – they need to read about or see the benefits that your products provide, i.e. how the products can improves their lives.
For example, if you’re selling cars, informing visitors that a car has the lowest fuel consumption in its class probably won’t sell it to them. You need to tell them that they won’t have to make as many trips to the petrol station and they will save money, which they can spend on the more important things in life.
In other words, you’re not selling a car – you’re selling the idea of extra cash at the end of every month for the customer to do with what they please. Don’t just describe a product or service, explain a solution to the customer’s problem.
1. Keep your design uncluttered
You want your website to be inexpensive, attractive and professional. The best way to achieve this is by using a template that is relatively low in cost or even, sometimes, free. A clean and uncluttered template design will be easier for you to work with than a busy and unstructured one. Not to mention much friendlier on the eye and better for the site loading time.
Avoid using lots of different fonts – one or two sans serif fonts are best for on-screen readability, especially if pages are text-heavy. Similarly, only use images and other media (quick and easy to add into templates) if they are relevant to the content – otherwise they’ll just slow your page loading time and eat up bandwidth.
Also, the colour scheme across your website should be recognisable and memorable. You should use your existing brand colours (colours that you already use in other marketing materials) and have a strong contrast between text and background.
There are further design elements to consider, but the goal is a professional and easy-to-navigate website. Enable a customer to go from product search to purchase in the quickest and easiest way possible, i.e. make prices and calls to action obvious driving customers to make a move.
2. Optimise your site
Advertising your site online is expensive, so save money by designing your site with another audience in mind – search engines. Where your site ranks in search engine listings can have a great effect on your traffic because some visitors, if not most, will arrive at your site via a search engine. And rather than employing an expert, you can optimise your site for search engines yourself.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) applies to the whole of your site – from the domain name and the page title to the headings, body text, image names and metatags.
It's important to strike a balance between optimising your site for your customers and for search engines
The visitor’s experience will deteriorate if you cram your site full of keywords (words that relate to your field and are likely to be used in searches), so try to find a good blend
Keywords should also be relevant to their particular page – this increases your chances of not only being found, but being found by the people who are looking for the specific product or service on that page.
Assign each page a descriptive URL too, separated with hyphens – search engines recognise individual words in URLs this way.
Regularly updating your site’s content is also beneficial. Search engines are always looking for new content and keeping your site fresh won’t just benefit the search engines, it’ll impress your visitors too.
3. You can design a great site without spending a fortune
No matter what your budget, creating an effective website that works for your customers and delivers for your business can be a challenge. These tips will make it a lot easier, and you won’t have to spend a fortune to get your site up and running.
