20 things business website must do

Business Website Design – 20 Things your Website must do

You are considering your business website design for a purpose.  Your business website should be your most valuable salesperson working 24/7. If your small business website is pulling in visitors but is not keeping them around or converting them to loyal customers, that means something is wrong. If your business website is more than a blog, it’s time to start updating your webpages with design features that enables the website to do certain things so that your business can take advantage of the huge potential consumer base of the online market. To capitalize on an opportunity and captivate real & live human customers, an optimized, functional, and interactive website is a must. Poor business website designs miss both the technical and content mark mostly due to clients and developers contributing to this design fallacy.

For most of its part, a business website is the principle point for providing information to your customers and it acts as a vital tool for generating new business enquiries. Let’s try to pinpoint certain things that your business website must absolutely do.

Table of Contents

1. Provide Business Information
2. Highlight services that bring in more Customers
3. Provide a great user experience
4. Have Easy Navigation
5. Offer original content
6. Describe concise business features
7. Provide a newsletter
8. Provide accurate option choices (Call to Actions or CTAs)
9. Show Contact Information Easily
10. Connect with Social Media
11. Have top notch security
12. Allow Easy Checkout
13. Offer a great experience
14. Provide Outbound and Inbound links
15. Give You Visitors Analytics
16. Provide SEO
17. Not waste the visitor’s time
18. Provide a review testimonial
19. Answer Visitor’s Questions on Frequently Asked Questions page
20. Provide positive ROI

Provide Business Information

This is obvious, when consumers access your business website for the first time, they will skim and scan through your web pages as they aren’t hooked on your brand yet. They are looking at your business website design for the first time.  Using crisp and concise statements, you can make your point alongside gaining the eye of a potential customer. Also, the information on your business website needs to be relevant as people came on your domain looking for something.

Highlight services that bring in more Customers

First impressions are last impressions; they count. When someone clicks on your business website, the business website design needs to create a good impression by being not just aesthetically pleasing but also by grabbing the visitor’s attention so that they are tempted to stay on the website for a while and in taking a look around, they turn from visitors to customers.

Provide a great user experience

Internet browsing habits vary from user to user. Some use computers while others prefer tablets and mobiles. An optimized website with a compatible display that provides universal access is the one thing your business website design must do. A website that is built using responsive design will provide the best experience for all users because it will adapt to the correct shape and size no matter what device it is being viewed on.  If you can’t do it yourself, hire a website designing company based in Charlotte NC. The beauty of having a website that is built by professionals is that it only needs to be developed once so there is no need to test out different modules on your own or upload different versions for different devices and sustainably speaking, it will save you a lot of money and time in the long run.

Have Easy Navigation

Nobody likes to look through countless pages of information. People want to find the information they’re looking for easily, so your business website design should be able to provide easy navigation to important pages. If your content isn’t discoverable in two or three clicks, the visitor will leave your website and go straight to one of your competitors. When you’re planning and designing your website, plan as a visitor and not as technical personnel and follow precise website design process.  You need to take into consideration that a variety of people will visit your web pages and each visitor is a potential customer and what information they’re presented should satiate their demands. Provide them with a clear navigation menu so they can access the details, which are most relevant to them without any unnecessary browsing.

Offer original content

People will want to visit your business website over and over again if it provides information and content that is not available anywhere else. Original, fresh and updated content will be the key. Keep adding and updating new, interesting and valuable content on a regular basis to ensure that people keep coming. This will also ensure a desirable rank in search engine optimization (SEO) which is necessary for your website showing up readily on search engines.

Describe concise business features

If your business website doesn’t outline clearly what your product or service does, how will the visitor turn into a customer? If your mission statement and product advantages aren’t spelt out clearly, what exactly will a customer gain by coming to your website? You just need to outline key business features and benefits and maybe even highlight them using a bold font and the customer will appreciate you for it.

Provide a newsletter

If someone likes your services once, they’ll like them again. Offer an option on your website to customers to subscribe a weekly/monthly newsletter. In this newsletter, offer updates to potential leads about all the services and products your business offers. You can diversify your options for blog updates, weekly e-newsletter or downloadable documents. Give the customer the choice to select and whatever they select, you offer those updates for just their email address. You can then use this valuable data to stay in touch with your customers and give your updates a personalized touch. You can also provide information about discounts & offers.

Provide accurate option choices (Call to Actions or CTAs)

When a prospective customer visits your business website what actions do you want them to perform? Do you want them to contact you directly or should they leave a request for a service quote? Should your customers directly buy a product or simply bulk order it? Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter or just tune in to your blog updates? Do visitors just need to treat your business website as a reading manual? Whatever it is that you want the customer to do, you need to mention it on your website, on every webpage.

Show Contact Information Easily

Consumers need to be able to contact you with queries and complaints. Ensure that your contact information is clickable or replicable. Don’t upload an image containing your information as that might cause inconvenience to your users. It’s also advisable to get an email address for your domain – it will only serve to make you more accessible. If you don’t want people to call your offices all the time, just supply the domain email address which gives you the option of approaching the customers as per your availability.

Connect with Social Media

Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. are very relevant in today’s day and age as people are spending a lot of time on their gadgets, on these Social Media platforms. If you want to be relevant, you have to promote your presence on these platforms. Social media is a very critical part of marketing, which will boost your traffic, help boost your SEO and aggregately it will improve your business’ footprint on the social web which will build you a legion of new followers.

Have top notch security

Your website will need an SSL certificate which will secure payments moving through your domain. SSL will encrypt your communications (i.e. a credit/debit card number, Social Security number) and this will pacify internet vary customers. If you accept credit card payments, your website must follow the protocols laid down by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI DSS).

Allow Easy Checkout

Try to minimize the number of steps and hoops a customer has to jump through for eCommerce website. Complex steps to add products to cart for buying them will result in the customers leaving the cart due to inconvenience. An annoyed customer is a customer lost forever.

Offer a great experience

The best websites are the ones that provide a great user experience so that customers keep coming back. The best websites tell great stories. These sites are engaging, interactive and fun to browse through. If your website does this, people will want to use your services again and again. A good business website design will hook the visitor right at the About Us section which highlights your business details.

Provide Outbound and Inbound links

Outbound links will help improve your search engine results (SEO) and make you look like a valuable resource. Outbound links will take your customer to specific web pages that will add to the customer experience. Inbound links carry even more search engine juice. Inbound links hyperlink back to your website from another website. Both of these will offer the best Search Engine Optimization.

Give You Visitor Analytics

I can’t stress this enough.  Get Google Analytics on your website.  With the Analytics’ figures, the website’s progress can be effectively monitored. You can try new ideas out and see how your viewers respond to it that is whether there is increased or decreased traffic to the changes. Any business website design should include functionality to gauge key indicators such as traffic, goals, and conversions.

Provide SEO

You need to optimize your content so that it hits the Search Engine Optimization sweet spot. Optimize your site for browsers and humans. For the humans, make interesting and understandable content while for the browsers, include all important on-page SEO tags and elements, including schema and XML sitemaps. You can see the difference by comparing a WordPress design and a Custom Website Design.

Not waste the visitor’s time

People invest time and energy while they browse through your website. If you tack a lot of plugins on your web pages with too many images and videos, the time it takes to load your site will increase. The more you patch onto each webpage, the more time will it take to load and that’s undesirable. Your website needs to be aesthetically pleasing but at the end of the day, your website’s usefulness will determine the amount of traffic you attract. People hate it when the website lags or redirects to videos and JPEGs that they didn’t ask for, so avoid doing that if you can.

Provide a review testimonial

Keeping a section on your website where the visitors can get a glimpse of what your existing customers think about your brand or relating their experiences of using your services or product will do the task of word-of-mouth marketing. This is quite essential to gain the trust of the people visiting your website for the first time. Authentic reviews and testimonials of clients along with their photos enraptures the attention of the visitors which in turn helps you gain their clientele and should be a part of every business website design.

Answer Visitor’s Questions on Frequently Asked Questions page

Always include an FAQ or Frequently Asked Questions section as people will have a lot of questions, concerns and feedback. A pre-prepared FAQ list won’t hurt either. This will not only satisfy the customer but it will make your company feel approachable.

Provide positive ROI

Return on Investment is a key component of every venture that exists. You can check our thoughts on most asked question ‘How much does a website cost?’ and determine what features are worth the greenback for you. There’s a shift towards simple, functional, and futuristic designs, which are not very expensive and promise an enhanced user engagement.  We’ve created this website cost quote calculator tool  for you you if you are just curious about the budget.

We hope that this list has answered all your basic queries and designing your own website won’t be a daunting task any more. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with uswith any questions regarding your website design needs.