Use language that makes sense to your audience—avoid jargon, corporate speak and acronyms. Some tips here. Blogs and social media updates are great ways to add fresh content, which keeps visitors returning and helps SEO strategy. Yes, keeping things fresh requires a bit of investment. Make it easy to engage, offer multiple points of contact: phone, email, social media and maybe an easy-to-use contact form.
A Google map is a bonus. Above all, ensure that this information is readily available on an easy-to-find contact page—if not every page of your site.
If your site asks nothing of visitors, they will surely do nothing. What is the purpose of your site? Is that purpose clear to visitors? Even informational sites want visitors to read and share articles, follow the company on social media, download toolkits, join mailing lists or learn more about the organization. Include an ask on each page. It needs to earn traffic.
Otherwise, all that effort in design, UX and content development will be for naught. There are hundreds of rules and guidelines for effective search engine optimization , so here are a few to start with:. I did. Arm yourself by reading some website design books first and expect to make some mistakes. You can also find lots of online help at WebReference. Read and understand the design concepts first, then proceed step by step.
Another approach is to hire a website design firm to design the website templates, navigation system, CGI and JavaScript programming, and perhaps do usability testing. They would set up the basic structure, and you could build it out using their template and design.
Make sure they spell out in writing exactly what they agree to do for how much money, and provide a firm deadline by which their work will be completed. Partial payments should be made as specific milestones are reached and approved. I strongly recommend that you build your website using a Content Management System CMS , rather than from single webpages uploaded and linked together.
You can find such systems available from many popular hosting services. Your designer sets up the basic templates; then you take it from there. To decide whether to outsource none, part, or all of your website project. What a mess! I learned quickly that you need to organize your site both logically and with multiple directories, one for each section.
Get a blank piece of paper and begin to lay out what your site will look like, with similar functions grouped together. You may know where everything goes right now, but what happens when you try to make sense of it a year or two from now? Your home page should provide a statement of exactly what your company or organization does.
I have to nose around trying to figure it out. State precisely what you do, and then provide links to the rest of your site so your visitor can learn more. My site structure diagram includes product pages, landing pages, and an ordering system.
More on those in Point 10 below. The focused content and reciprocal linking pages are designed to boost your search engine ranking, and are described in Point 8 below. Big companies spend millions to build confidence through brand name familiarity.
Small businesses tell their story, often illustrated with photos, to help visitors understand and trust them. If you have a passion about what you do, tell your visitors about it in this section!
To structure your site and break up your webpages into logical directories and subdirectories to avoid confusion later. The larger your site, the more important redundant navigation systems are — more systems than you think you might need. Here are some of the basic systems and a few you might not have thought of:. Except for the very smallest five- or six-page sites, I encourage you to implement two or more of these systems.
What may be obvious to you and your designer after looking at the site for weeks may not be obvious at all to your visitor. Look at a text menu you admire and study the HTML by viewing the source. Text is good; buttons are bad — especially when overdone. Got it? Insist that your site developer not use frames! More on this in Point 7 below. If you have a complex site, I recommend that you employ a professional website designer to set up your navigation system — even if you do all the rest.
Why should a website look good? Why should it look professional? Because like the sign hanging over a store in the strip mall, your website reflects upon you and your business. You owe it to yourself to make your website look top-notch. I could take you to many websites, but you can do that yourself. Become a student of how to create a simple, clean business look. It takes a lot of skill to design a site this well and with this kind of restraint.
Let me tell you a secret. Some graphic designers like to build sites with lots of graphics. One of your best website investments will be in a few excellent, royalty-free stock photos. Well-composed photos add a touch of class to your webpages. They provide a visual center of interest in an otherwise plain webpage. They add spice and color. To create a sense of energy and maximum effort, you might use a theme of photos from competitive sports, for example.
Use your imagination. I subscribe to ClipArt. Such a deal! To develop a quality, professional appearance for the website that represents your organization. Commercial websites are built from templates. Now you can create page after page from the template. Have fun!
But let me take this a step further. Take a look at the sample webpage from my site. On the webpage a single line of code calls one of these files and places it where it belongs on the page.
The beauty of this kind of modular system is that a site built with SSIs can be modified or completely altered by just changing one of the SSI files and uploading it to the server. Now all the webpages in the entire system reflect the change.
When I discovered how to do this it cut my maintenance time dramatically. When you change the font size on a single master CSS file, it changes the fonts and colors in all your webpages.
Make sure your website designer builds webpages using a single CSS file, since it saves maintenance costs in the long run. The design decisions that you need to consider here are many, since they involve every detail of the look and feel of your basic template. With a little practice, anyone can build a webpage. Let me mention two important aspects of building a search engine friendly site:.
In Greek mythology, as you know, partly human female creatures called Sirens lured mariners with their singing. Your webpages ought to entice search engine spiders or robots to index your site.
Each webpage you construct needs to contain the following elements. Note the careful placement of keywords, the search words people would use to find this particular webpage. Let the actual content on that page dictate what keywords should stand out. Your goal is not to trick the search engines in some kind of bait-and-switch scam, but to help the search engines recognize and index appropriately the actual content of your webpages.
Of course, search engine rankings are heavily influenced by incoming links to your site, but constructing your webpages with an eye to search engines is very important, too.
Navigation systems are built to help actual humans find their way around your website. But these navigation systems had better be designed carefully or the search engines will throw up their hands in disgust, with the result that actual humans will never get to your website.
Shopify Plus: Shopify Plus is Shopify, but with a higher level of customization, more staff accounts, and international e-commerce options. It also has a higher level of support. However, all of this obviously comes with a higher subscription cost, and it still does not have all the flexibility and customization abilities as WooCommerce. Business Squarespace: Squarespace has an e-commerce subscription option, so if you chose Squarespace to build your site and have very simple e-commerce needs, you can choose this route.
Business Squarespace charges a transaction fee, but this can be bypassed by upgrading your subscription to a basic online store. It includes a free domain, SSL security, SEO, abandoned cart recovery, discounts, real-time carrier shipping, and more.
However, it has been noted it is not as user-friendly as Shopify. And like Shopify, it is simply not as flexible as WooCommerce. Wix: Wix actually has a Shopify extension which is very user friendly. You will have to upgrade your Wix account and subscribe to Shopify in order to use it.
GoDaddy Online Store: GoDaddy has a relatively new e-commerce standalone subscription platform that is relatively easy to set up and use. Very little technical knowledge is required to launch your shop with GoDaddy Online Store. The templates are simple and clean, and somewhat customizable. Features include marketing and SEO tools, social media integration, appointment booking, SSL security, rapid page loading, and more. Other Articles From AllBusiness. Make sure your small business website interface leaves a positive impression that drives results.
You can do so by implementing the following suggestions:. SEO is a set of practices you apply to your website to ensure search engines index and rank your website appropriately and then show it to search engine users. The better your website design and content is, the higher your site will show up on search engine result pages.
SEO is an extremely important ongoing process that can mean the difference between showing up on the first page of search engine results pages resulting in large amounts of free traffic to your website or page resulting in no traffic. If you want to rank highly in search engine results and encourage people to return to your site again and again, you will have to update your website with new and relevant content as frequently as possible. In addition to static page content and articles, a great form of content to post on your website is testimonials.
Asking for testimonials from your customers and then publishing them on your website is a great way to post fresh, high-quality content on your site that makes your small business more attractive. These tools can be used to track the following types of information:.
In order to have a successful website that ranks well in search engines and doesn't get hacked, you need to make sure it is properly maintained. As you can tell after reading this article, creating a great small business website may not be as simple as you first thought. However, if you follow the steps set forth in this article, your small business will have an excellent chance at succeeding in the online marketplace. I have been involved in building or marketing over business websites.
Visit my website www. This article was originally published on AllBusiness. This is a BETA experience.
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