Are you a small business owner or a start-up searching for small business website design tips and tricks? Congrats for stumbling upon the right spot!
A professional website is an inevitable aspect for businesses irrespective of its size and scale. If you are a small business owner, the digital transformation journey can be quite frightening. Companies that offer web design services for small businesses come in handy in these situations. You need to be precautious while choosing them as you need to see that they are ready to understand your business need and are quite well-versed in the latest technology stacks. In order to choose the right website designers for small businesses, you need to convince yourself of the need for a website.
What does a good website do?
- It drives more meaningful and relevant traffic to your business
- It generates more leads
- It helps users to understand your business addresses the pain points of them
- It extends your brand’s reach to anyone in the world
- It conveys professionalism and ensures repeat customers
Now, what makes a website good or great?
- Well-organized and functional
- Easy-to-use navigation
- Optimized for mobile
- Original and engaging content
- Eye-catchy design
- Clear call to actions
- Speed
- Optimized for search
- Clean and validated code
Keeping all these points in mind, I’ve brought together some proven small business website design tips to make your website work for your brand. These tips are time-saving, simple, and easy to achieve with the help of a seasoned company like Cleffex, a leading provider of website design services in Canada.
Let’s get going straight to the tips without any delay.
8 SMALL WEBSITE DESIGN TIPS
1. Work with experts
Collaborating with an experienced and skilled website development company is a key factor in giving your brand an impressive web presence. Who builds the website makes the difference between an amateur website and an outstanding website.
Only a seasoned provider of web design services for small businesses will know the new tools and methods that are getting introduced into the web design world. These tools are great in making your websites functional and appealing. Delegating your website development task to an external agency will help in saving time. They will also take care of your website’s maintenance.
Handing over your website development task to an onshore or offshore web development agency will help you have all areas covered: security, backups, hosting, plugins, speed testing, etc.
When you work with experts, the rest of the tips will be taken care of effectively. Let’s cover them one by one.
2. Create a plan
Preparing a plan is crucial both for website development and website revamp projects. Although you are delegating your website design and development task to an expert, it is important to have a comprehensive plan of what you want to do and how you will do it. You also need to sketch out how each element of your website will help serve your customers. Consult an expert agency that provides web design services for small businesses. They will help you identify website goals, create user personas, discover your unique selling proposition (UPS), secure a domain name and hosting, collect design elements, and create content.
3. Make your website stand out with a simple & unique design
Keeping the website design simple, unique, and fresh is key to making the first impression of visitors impressive. You need to take a prudent decision here between an off-the-shelf design template and a completely custom-designed bespoke website just for you. The former will give your website a one among the many feel, while the latter gives a unique look and feel that helps your brand to stand out.
Though the pre-built template helps you roll out your website without depending on a website developer, it suffers from restricted design flexibility, lack of business centricity, and security issues. Whereas, a bespoke website design reflects your brand effectively as it is built for you by some experts.
4. Clutter-free is the rule
Simplicity and airiness take the central role when it comes to website design. See to it that the design is simple and captivating at the same time. Refrain from using complicated design and excessive information. Your home page should be refreshing with adequate information on who you are and what you do. Uncluttered design throughout your website will send across a positive message of professionalism and pleasantness.
5. Speak to customer problems
Addressing customer problems is the major cause why your business exists and this should be reflected across your business website. This is the most important among the small business website design tips. Speaking to customer problems and strategic placing of a clear call to action is crucial in this direction. It is true that customers are bothered more about their problems than the services you offer. You will get their attention only when you state your services as a solution to their problem.
6. Mobile-friendly
Making your website look and perform well on mobile is an unavoidable aspect that most of the agencies who cater to web design services for small businesses work on. As Google resorts to mobile-first (the predominant use of the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking), it is foolish to let this aspect go. You need to make your business website responsive to screens and ensure that your site offers a user-friendly experience across all devices.
7. Adhere to popular conventions
Never ignore well-known conventions while designing your business website. It’s natural for people to expect navigation on the top, sidebars on the right, and footers on the foot. This has become an intuitive thing as they have built their expectations from past experiences. Therefore, never discard conventions. If you change them drastically on your website, people may feel disoriented and will go away from your site and eventually, your brand. Sticking to conventional design elements and patterns helps people to find what they need from your website easily and can act on specific CTAs.
8. Make your website easily discoverable
Optimizing your website for search engine or search engine optimization (SEO) is another mandatory element to be taken care of. Make your website SEO-friendly. It means that the number of pages, structure, organization, and interaction should be carefully planned. The specific elements that Google and Bing are looking for should be present on your website. They are nothing but keyword-optimized quality content, sitemaps, URLs, and other SEO features. Expert website designers will keep the needs of users and search engines in mind while designing in consultation with digital marketing service experts.
NOW WHAT?
Do you feel that building a small business website is not as easy as you thought? Do not worry! These tips are going to be great guidelines as you go ahead with website designing or redesigning. Get help from reputed and dependable providers of web design services for small businesses to make your journey relaxing. At Cleffex, we help businesses of all sizes with smart website development services by merging imagination and technology. Call us to talk about your website design and development needs.