Designing Your Small Business Website: A Non-Techy Guide

Your website is your primary marketing strategy for your business. A good website will attract customers, build credibility, and increase sales. First impressions can either encourage or discourage users from returning to your website. Here are a few things to consider when you first embark on your website journey:

Step 1: Define Your Goals

It's important to understand the goals for your website. It's an asset to you as a business owner, as well as anyone who is involved in building and maintaining your site.

Is the goal of your website to:

• Showcase your products and/or services

• Generate leads

• Increase sales

• Share knowledge

• Promote events

• Sell products online

• Book services online

Most often, goals will be a combination of all or some of the above. Your goals will help define your site's structure, interactive elements you may need, and content management systems that you may need to house your company's information.

It's important to note that a thoroughly-laid out vision for a website can happen in phases. A small business may choose to start off their website as a landing page to showcase their business; but have a long-term plan to add components in the future (i.e., selling products online will happen in year two).

Not everything has to be built all at once. But a detailed plan will facilitate the process when choosing to add components in the future.

Step 2: Know Your Audience

Who will be looking at your website? Have you considered your main audience and their preferences, demographics and behaviors? Things to consider:

• Are they computer-savvy? Or alternatively, avoid anything to do with technology?

• Do they need to just get the information quickly?

• Do they want to spend time navigating through screens of information?

• Are they most likely to access your website through a desktop or mobile?

Tailoring your website design to meet their needs and expectations will enhance their user experience. 60% of website traffic worldwide comes from mobile services. Are you spending money and hours developing a site for desktop versus designing it for mobile? Does your website need to be fully functional for both desktop and mobile?

Step 3: Plan Your Content

Plan your content strategy so that it aligns with your brand messaging and your customer needs.

Step 4: Choose the Right Platform

What website builder fits your needs (WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc.)? Are you comfortable building your own website using a website builder or will you be seeking the advice from an agency or web designer to build your site?

With many website platforms to choose from, it is important to review each platforms functionalities to determine their suitability for your business needs. Consider things like how easy are they to use, customization options, built-in functions, ability to integrate, etc.

Step 5: Design for User Experience

A user's experience with your website will determine if they revisit your site. Up to 80% of mobile users will leave a website that doesn't display correctly on their device. 85% of users want a mobile experience that is as good as a desktop. Some of the reasons why a user would leave your website:

• Message is not clear

• Contact information is absent

• Poor design and navigation

• Too slow to load

Sometimes, simplicity and clarity goes a long way.

Step 6: Optimize for Search Engines

With all of the websites today, how do you make your website stand out apart from the others? How is your website listed when people search Google or Bing? Does your website appear on the first page of the search results or do people have to type your website address to find it?

It is important for your website to incorporate basic search engine optimization (SEO) principles. This means that keywords and phrases are added to page and site elements, meta tags are added, images are tagged, URLs are optimized. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes of creating a website. Adopting SEO principles into the design of your website will increase the traffic to your site.

Step 7: Incorporate Branding Elements

Will your website stand out from your competitors? Will users recognize your business when they see unique elements that only pertains to your business. Incorporating logos, colors and fonts to your website design and other business artefacts helps reinforce your identity and builds trust with your customers.

Step 8: Test and Iterate

As mentioned earlier, not everything has to be built all at once. Your website building experience is ever-evolving. Gathering feedback from users is critical and can help you determine what works and doesn't work for your site.

Monitoring your site's analytics can also help you determine which features are most viewed, how fast your site pages are, and how well your site is gaining traffic on the internet.

Making iterative improvements over time will ensure continued success and site visibility.

Conclusion

A well-thought plan for a website will help small business owners in the long run. Your website is your first impression and huge marketing strategy for your business. Spending the time to identify goals, target audiences, and content early on in the process will be beneficial to everyone involved in launching your website. Consult with website designers, SEO specialists, and other business owners to discover opportunities, review lessons learned, and gain insight on all of the resources that are available to you as a small business owner.

Savvy Software Skills

References

Zippia. "20 Mobile Vs. Desktop Usage Statistics [2023]: What Percentage Of Internet Traffic Is Mobile?" Zippia.com. Mar. 28, 2023, https://www.zippia.com/advice/mobile-vs-desktop-usage-statistics/

Zippia. "25+ Useful User Experience Statistics [2023]: What Is The Value Of UX?" Zippia.com. Feb. 27, 2023, https://www.zippia.com/advice/user-experience-statistics/