A Guide for Building Your Business Website

With so much focus on the digital world, and with technology meaning that most consumers will use your website to interact, check on, and judge you and your business, it’s essential that your professional website is up to scratch.

As an entrepreneur building your first website for your first business, this is even more crucial as it could be the difference between whether a consumer chooses to do business with you or not. Sometimes, the simplest error on a website can push a consumer to seek a solution elsewhere.

Keep Your Design in Line With Your Brand

Before you begin to develop any website, you need to understand your own business message, tone of voice and aesthetic additions such as logos and taglines. You then need to ensure that the design of your website fits in perfectly with this. Simple choices, even such as chosen font or color scheme, can give off a particular message regarding a business.

If your logo is a certain color, for instance, it makes sense to keep your website design in line with this color scheme.

Understand What Kind of Site Yours Needs to Be

There are many angles you can consider when developing your business website. You will need to consider the purpose of your website and your business goals when planning which type of website is best for you.

The Different Types of Business Websites

Lead Generation

This is a great opportunity to learn more about your customers and generate leads for all-important sales. Lead generation websites usually have a form or questionnaire that visitors can fill out in line with their reason for landing on your page, or for the service they’re looking for.

This can also be in line with gaining customer contact information, such as email addresses, and building your customer database with these details.

Ecommerce Sites

With certain businesses comes a certain understanding of what should be provided on a website. For those selling products or services, you will need to understand the best practices for ecommerce website development in order to build a website which has a marketplace and buying system for your items — alongside the basics of providing informative content and key information about your business.

If you’re selling a product, it goes without saying that you will need an ecommerce website.

Branding Sites

These sites are dedicated to informing the visitor about a particular brand and product. It will be packed with information regarding the brand story, and everything the visitor needs to know. This can be a helpful site for launching (or relaunching) a product and for general promotion of a particular brand name.

Publishing Websites

A good example of a publishing site is a news website, or a website which provides informative and entertaining blogs and articles. This is usually coupled with advertisements to generate revenue for the business.

Support Websites

If you have a product or service which may require additional support, such as technology or anything in line with warranty assistance, then support websites are dedicated to helping consumers with those types of concerns.

Support websites will usually have categories of help topics or frequently asked questions in order to hopefully provide a solution for your consumer.

General Business Sites

Every business needs a basic website. Any business which does not have a website in this day and age can be a cause for concern for many consumers, as official websites are usually where consumers go to learn more about a business, find contact details or make a decision on whether to do business with you.

A general business site can provide important information, including an ‘about us’ section, accreditations, customer reviews and contact details. It may also include guides to your range of products and services (even if you are not an online store) or informative pages, such as a blog or media content.

Optimize Your Site

How well your site works is a reflection of your business. Any site which is slow, fails to load or consistently runs into errors will soon have your consumers believing that you aren’t a business to depend on.

When optimizing your site, think about:

• Page loading times
• Overall speed
• Layout
• Optimizing for all devices (i.e. ensuring that your website is still useable on a mobile device)
• Images and video content: do they load correctly without blurring or buffering?

Easy Navigation is Key

This point is especially pertinent if you have a lot of information to portray, or many categories of products or services. You want visitors to be able to find exactly what they are looking for using the least amount of time as possible.

While it’s important to encourage longer time spent on your site with engaging content and reasons for consumers to stay and learn more about you, when it comes to navigation it needs to be as simple as possible. Otherwise, you may succeed in landing new visitors to your site, only to drive them off if they become frustrated because of a complicated layout and unhelpful tabs.

Always Plan Your Content

This doesn’t just mean initially, either. To keep your website updated and the best it can be, you need to constantly upload and edit for new content, even if it’s a simple video or new blog post. Not only does this keep your website refreshed for new or returning visitors, but it also helps your search engine rankings by letting Google know that you’re updating and staying relevant.

Planning out your content in advance means you can best tailor for SEO, as well as engagement needs. It ensures you can plan out the best content for your media, videos, articles or blogs, and you can then link back to these through your social media channels in order to promote new content.

Choose a Relevant Domain Name

You want your website to be found by the right people, so a domain name which easily and clearly explains who you are is key. This could be your official business name, or in line with your industry or product.

Following these tips, you’re well on your way to the ideal business website.