Your business’s website represents an opportunity to make a great first impression on clients. This is where you demonstrate why your products and services are valuable and how they’re having a positive impact on clients and the industry you serve.
A well-designed, eye-catching website immediately adds professionalism to your brand and value to your business. It’s a place for keeping customers informed and educated on your brand’s activities and principles. When done well, it generates new leads and builds a sense of character and ‘brand voice’ that resonates with customers.
Your website represents your brand. It’s an always-on avenue of customer engagement and must be aligned with other channels like your social media presence. Consistency drives more traffic and ultimately improves sales.
Taking the time to assess and improve your website allows you to expand your reach of potential clients. Key questions to ask include:
- How visually appealing is it?
- Does it represent your brand well?
- Have you clearly communicated your message across the site?
- Do your pages load quickly?
- Does your website connect to your social media presence?
If the answer is no to any of these, it may be time to build a better website. While you can make a few quick fixes yourself, investing in a web designer and other professionals may help provide the guidance you need to take your website to the next level.
Every business’s journey is different, but there are a few best practices to consider.
Here are nine steps to help businesses build a better website:
1. Keep it simple
Website improvement starts with the home page. Your home page clearly communicates what your business is, the products or services you offer, and who you and your team are. Include pictures of yourself, your team, and your business so visitors can feel they're getting to know you.
Think about how you engage with a website; do you read it like a book? You most likely read it quickly. Embrace the power of white space and limit the amount of text around images.
2. Ensure your website is optimised for all devices
Visitors might find your website via their laptop, tablet and/or mobile phone. Each device has a different screen size. You'll need to build a website that can engage with all devices.
Responsive websites automatically adjust to seamlessly fit the screen size of a laptop, tablet, smartphone, or any other device your website could be accessed from. You want to be sure all visitors have a great experience regardless of the device they use.
3. Content is king
Once visitors find your site, you want to keep them there. Use informative, concise content to tell a compelling story about who you are, what you do, and how you distinguish yourself from your competitors. Use appropriate and consistent colours, fonts, and high-quality images and videos.
YOUR WEBSITE IS OFTEN THE FIRST IMPRESSION YOUR BUSINESS MAKES ON NEW CLIENTS. TAKING THE TIME TO EVALUATE and improve YOUR WEBSITE EXPANDs YOUR REACH OF POTENTIAL CLIENTS.
You can start by evaluating your "About Us" page. If you don't have one, build one. Share who you are, your mission or vision statement, and high-quality images of you and your team. Display your social media channels clearly on the home page to encourage users to follow you. Also include a “Contact Us” page that shares your address, phone number, and email address.
4. Optimise site load times
Fast website access times are fundamental to a great visitor experience. If your site takes too long to load, visitors may lose patience and leave before they learn why you're exactly the business they should engage.
You can measure page load time with free tools such as Google's PageSpeed Insights or the DebugBear Speed Test. Just enter your website URL for an analysis of your page speed metrics and get recommendations on how to optimise your website performance.
5. Improve inclusivity and accessibility
When building a better website, it's important to be thoughtful about visitors who may have disabilities. Building a site that’s aligned with The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) (WCAG) is a great way to ensure you provide access to your entire audience.
W3C is an organisation with a commitment to promoting usability for people with disabilities and offers guidelines. This standard is centred on simple and easy-to-navigate design principles of perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. This also helps visitors with slower network connections and improves the mobile experience.
6. Organise your site well
Your website should be smooth and simple to navigate. Create an inviting site that has a well-thought-out navigation bar, with content that becomes more specific as visitors dive into its subsections under main headers.
It also should have clear call to actions with working links. Clean, uncluttered web pages that allow your visitors to easily find information encourage them to stay on your site for longer.
7. Shorter can be better
Look at your site and ask: is my content too verbose? Good business websites have engaging headlines and scannable content with bullet points and links that take visitors to helpful content.
It can help to take a break after drafting your updates and come back to finalise your changes, along with asking others for feedback.
8. Implement an SEO strategy
Search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) strategies that drive traffic are incredibly important considerations when building a business website. SEO is focused on driving engagement through your content while SEM drives engagement through organic and paid search.
SEO and SEM are highly specialised fields that can improve your website's engagement and visibility. Consider engaging with qualified SEO and SEM professionals to ensure you're driving as much traffic as possible.
9. Find creative support
As a busy small business owner, you may benefit from leveraging creative professionals, such as designers and copywriters, to help build a better website. This talent can be found on sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, Upwork, People Per Hour, and 99 Designs. You can also leverage your LinkedIn network to find talented creative professionals.
Key Takeaways for building a good business website
Website improvement is an ongoing task. Make it part of your practice to regularly evaluate your content to ensure it remains relevant and current. Make necessary changes to product information, business hours, and prices, along with updating articles and white papers as needed.
By keeping your strategy consistent, you can keep visitors on your site longer, driving greater awareness and revenue for your business