When you have a small business to run, one of the major things that you are going to need to think about is, of course, the marketing. And one of the primary components of your marketing, in most cases, is going to be the website. Your website is an important part of your online presence. It is one of the primary means of ensuring that your business will be seen and heard. A well-functioning website helps to ensure your business grows in the way you want it to.

By ensuring that you are creating the perfect website, you should find that you can generate a much brighter future for your business in no time. In this article, we’ll look at how you might do that, and what it might entail to create the perfect site for your small business.

Creating the Perfect Website For Your Small Business

Find The Perfect Domain Name

You might be surprised at the importance of the perfect domain name. There is a reason that so many people put such a lot of effort into this part of the process. When you have a perfect domain name, you are going to find that you are much more likely to get people to organically find your website.

The right domain name will just generally help the feel of the whole site to be much more professional and complete as well. It is actually worth spending a longer time trying to find the perfect domain name if you can. This will help you feel much more confident about the website to begin with.

You might need to think outside the box if you are going to find the right one, and your business name might not be available in the ideal form at first. Many small business owners admit to choosing the domain name first and then naming the business after that, and there is certainly much to be said for that way of going about things. If you want to do that, just make sure that it is going to work as a business name too, otherwise you might well end up with a business with a poor name.

Finding the perfect domain name will set you up for a much brighter future, so it’s worth spending some time on.

Choose A Platform

In most cases, small business owners will use website building platforms in order to put their website together. This is something that you certainly should consider. For one thing, it just makes the process of having a website that much easier, and it means that you are going to have a great deal of support available as well while you are building the site. The support alone is something that a lot of people will be glad to have.

Of course, all of this is dependent upon the fact that you need to choose a platform that you are going to be happy using. This is something that can actually be very difficult to do if you are not website design savvy just yet.

When you are choosing a platform, there are a lot of things to consider. If you are going for one of the major ones, then you’ll need to think about whether there are certain qualities that one has that the other doesn’t. For instance, looking at Squarespace vs WordPress, you may see that one might be easier to use, while the other could provide you with more options and presets. It is all likely to be relevant to consider.

You’ll also want to look into whether the platform you are considering has paid options for extra features. If so, you will have to decide whether they are worth it. If they are not worth it at first glance, then you are likely to find that these extras could make a significant difference to your website in the end. All in all, choose a platform that you are comfortable using and which seems to offer everything you need, or as close to everything as possible.

Sketch Out Your Pages

Just as if you were designing a book, you need to think about sketching out the pages that you are going to have on your website. For now, it could just be a brief sketch of the pages you will have, their likely functions, and so on. Or, you might want to go into some detail straight away.

In any case, sketching it out on paper is going to mean that you have a clearer sense of what you are trying to achieve when you start to build it online. This is bound to help you to keep it unified and get it right.

In terms of what pages you want, that depends on the function of the website as a part of your small business. But in most cases, you will want the following pages:

• home page
• about page
• contact page
• product (or service) page

If you have additional needs, you may perhaps include a photo gallery, and maybe a blog. There might be other pages you want as well, depending on the nature of your business. Of course, for an ecommerce business, it is going to be a different story altogether. For now, get a general sense of the pages that you need, and a basic design that they are likely to follow, so that you can start to work out the look of the website.

Think About Design

Many people struggle with the design of their website. This is one of the main areas that a lot of people hire a web developer for, and it is definitely a good idea to do that if you are struggling yourself. In general, you want to try and keep the design as simple as possible. A simple design usually means that it is easier to navigate, which is an important feature that you need to focus on too.

The design is also going to have to reflect your business’ brand design. If you have already worked hard on your branding, then this could be easy to incorporate.

If you don’t have a solid visual brand just yet, you might need to think about what you are going to do to make sure that your website is going to guide visitors in the right direction with regard to the branding. This could mean developing the site and the brand at the same time. However you do it, thinking about design at this stage is going to prove very important.

 

Make It Mobile Friendly

If you look at the statistics for internet usage, it shows how starkly things are becoming mobile-led. Since you want as many people as possible to use your website, you are going to have to make sure that it is mobile friendly. If it isn’t, you will simply alienate many visitors who would otherwise hang around to see what your site is all about. Fortunately, this is easy enough to do these days, especially if you use a preset platform.

The majority of current website templates have a mobile-responsive and are designed to be used across mobile platforms. It’s just a matter of making sure that you test it out on mobile as you go along and develop your site. If you do that, you will have a mobile friendly site in no time.

As you can see, there are plenty of things to think about if you want to create the perfect website for your small business. As long as you have considered all of this, you are going to find that your website really does what it should.

Ciao,
Miss Kemya