Every business, regardless of its size and niche, is stepping on the digital frontier to make its presence felt to the world. Whether you’re a freelance writer, own a grocery store, or running any other small business, a well-functional website can be your gateway to success.
The best web designing & development agency will build a new website or make your current site more effective to bring more customers to your doorstep.
That’s why small businesses are increasingly approaching a website designing company to create a great website. But creating an effective website or renovating an old one is not an easy task. There are some essential tips that should be followed precisely to build a great small business website.
So, to help you ensure that your web development agency is on the right track, here we’re mentioning the essential tips to follow while creating a website.
Get A Domain Name
The domain name is the website address and represents the niche of your business. Therefore, it is important to choose one that creates a good impression and supports search engine optimization.
Here is how you can come up with a relevant and optimal domain name:
- Ensure that it is easy to spell. Avoid using slang or difficult words.
- Don’t make it too lengthy. The shorter the domain name will be, the easier it would be to remember and type correctly.
- Go for a appropriate domain extension, like .com, .org, .co, etc.
- Better not to use characters and numbers as they are hard to remember.
- Make it catchy to make your website stand against the numerous other websites on the internet. Plus, people remember such names for a longer time.
- Research the domain name you come up with to ensure that there are no other similar domain names. You can search on USPTO.gov to ensure it does not contain any registered trademarks.
- Make sure it is available at a reasonable price
- Pick a name that connects with your business
- Make an SEO-friendly URL that includes keywords and geo-location.
Purchase A Scalable And Secure Web Hosting
Website hosting is a service that hosts a website on the internet and makes it accessible to the customers. So, after getting a domain name, connect it with your hosting provider to show your website to customers when they click on the website address.
The charges for hosting services can cost you anywhere between $2 to $100 per month, based on the support and technology you choose. Some famous web hosting services are GoDaddy, DreamHost, BlueHost, SiteGround, InMotion.
Tips for choosing the right hosting services plan:
- If you have a tight budget, you can get a “shared server” plan that will cost $2 a month. But the same can lower the performance of your site as the resources will be shared with other customers too. Plus, if the other websites on the server get hacked, it might infect your website too.
- A “dedicated server” is another option that can cost $100 to $2000 a month. The service will make your website function well, as the server will be entirely dedicated to your website. Although the service is expensive for small businesses or startups, you can go for this hosting plan once the business is established.
- To get the benefits of both the servers mentioned above, you can go for a “virtual private server.” It offers you the security and performance of a dedicated server at a cost ranging between $20 to $50 a month.
- Ensure that the hosting company you choose offers chat/phone support so they can help you quickly when an issue comes up.
- An easy-to-use server interface like cPanel to access your server is another thing to check. This will save you from the complex task of using terminal commands to view your server contents and make changes. The task sometimes also calls to hire a web development agency or server administrator to help you.
Represent Clearly What Your Business Is All About
A website is the digital representation of your business and voice out messages on its behalf. Therefore, it becomes crucial that the banners on the home page and other important pages depict the services right, and the text return must show how the services can help potential clients.
In addition, ensure that the main and footer navigation menus contain the “About Us” page link so customers can learn more about your business.
Choose The Best Content Management System
A content management system is an application or software that helps you create and manage digital content. With a reliable CMS at your disposal, you can maintain your site well without having much technical knowledge. Go for a CMS that meets your business needs and fulfills the expectations you have for your website. Some popular CMS are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Wix, and Squarespace.
Pick A Trusted E-Commerce Platform
A website can help you sell different products and services simultaneously. Creating an e-commerce site will allow your customers to financially transact with you and improve sales and profit. For your small business, you can go for a web designing & development agency that uses affordable platforms like WooCommerce, Business Squarespace, Shopify, Shopify Square, GoDaddy Online Store, and Wix.
Create A Friendly User-Interface
Your website interface must be engaging, friendly, and create a positive impression to drive positive results. Follow the tips below to create one such interface:
- Incorporate attractive graphics and easy-to-read & minimum fonts.
- Optimize images for faster loading.
- Know your competition and check how they have designed and optimized their websites. Implement better components that work better for your small business website.
- Find your target audience and what they expect from your site and accomplish it.
- Create an intuitive navigation system to help users easily get to the pages they need.
- Incorporate obvious call-to-action.
- Include easily accessible contact information.
- Create pages that are standard for small business websites, such as:
Home
About us
Products/Services
Sitemap
Management team
Contact us
Terms of use (the online contract governing how users can use your site)
Privacy policy
Additional pages relevant to the business
Optimize Site For Search Engines
No matter how good a website you create unless it cannot draw customers to your business doorstep. That’s when SEO comes into the picture. Make sure that your website is SEO-friendly so that search engines like Google can show it on the top of their results pages whenever a user searches for a product or service you offer.
You can take help from a website designing company to create an SEO-friendly website.
Publish Quality Content
Quality content is the backbone of good SEO. Therefore, creating and publishing fresh content is better to make search engines rank your website better. Update your site with new and relevant content and ask customers to leave a review, which will make your business more attractive.
Get A Web Maintenance Plan
A website is something you have to maintain throughout your business life-cycle. Here are some tips for choosing a maintenance plan for your small business website to ensure that search engines consistently rank your site better.
- Go through the Webmaster Tools data at least once a month.
- Use traffic data to know more about your audience and serve them better.
- Use performance data for optimizing the website and fixing errors.
- Always keep the software up to date.
- Run security scans to secure your site from malware.
- Take back up of your website in multiple ways frequently.
You can also hire a web development agency to perform the maintenance task for you.
In Conclusion
Creating a great small business website is not something easy to do. But with the tips mentioned above, you can conquer the task and grow your small business big. If you want professional help, hiring the best web designing and development company can be your best option.
We hope that the article has provided you with enough essential tips to build a great small business website. If you have any questions or doubts, feel free to ask in the comments section.
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