Small Business Website Design

Devising a well-structured plan is the first step in every small business website design process. The best way is to approach a new small business website design is to first decide what are the objectives of your website, what kind of products or services is the site going to provide and what sort of budget you have available. After determining all these factors you will be better positioned to begin your small business website designer search.

There is no shortage of business website designers in Australia. All the major cities of Australia, including Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide etc boast a large number of website design companies. Of course finding a designer is often easier than making sure they are going to produce you a quality website for your small business.

With that in mind here are some tips and things to consider when it comes to small business website design:

Keep It Simple and User Friendly

When it comes to small business website design, simple, clean and focussed designs prove to be most effective as they are more user friendly and create a low friction environments for potential customers. Things to avoid are harsh colours, heavy flash, extremely graphics-intensive designs, overcrowding of elements and trying to sell everything at once.

Website Navigation: Keep it obvious and logical

Website navigation is critical in minimising visitor abandonment and allowing them to get to where they want to be as quickly as possible. It’s important to remember that when it comes to small business website designs, if a visitor cannot navigate a website effectively they’ll become frustrated which is a big problem when they are only a Google search away from becoming your competition’s customer.

With this in mind, the navigation should be simple, clear and obvious so that the visitors can find it easily and probably more important is that the visitors can get to the page they want to be on in the fewest possible clicks without getting lost or frustrated.

Content: It’s what visitors value

It is the content of your website that search engines rank and what visitors come to your site for. It divulges more details about your products or services and helps inform them as to whether you are the company they want to give their hard earned money to.

Well written content grabs more visitors attention and encourages them to further explore your site helping to build customer familiarity with your business. Content helps start and build customer relationships, which will help bring in a lot of business, so content integration into your website should be a very important consideration.

At the same time search engines love content, particularly search engine optimised content, making SEO one of the most critical elements of a small business website design. SEO friendly content basically means that content that is easily indexable for the search engines and being viewed by the search engines as being of high potential value to their searchers.

SEO: Design your site for search engines as well as people

SEO or search engine optimisation is argued by many to one of the biggest factors in the success of most business websites. As such, your small business website design should always be considering the SEO implications of design elements. So make sure that your site is not only designed for visitors, but also designed for search engines. It’s important to realise that SEO is a specialisation in itself and often it is prudent to opt for a professional SEO consultant to consult on the SEO of your website design while it’s still in the design phase.

Conversion Optimisation Strategy: Traffic is great; but sales are better

At the end of the day websites should be working assets within a business, not just a billboard to show off some design flare. So it’s important that the business objectives are not lost in a web designer’s vision of creating a visual masterpiece. Remember to integrate prominent calls to action through all of your pages, this includes prominent positioning of business phone numbers, obvious email contact forms, content that is not just designed to rank well search engines but also designed to turn those visitors into leads or sales. Both the design and content of the site should be looking to minimise elements that cause buying friction as well as look to address the concerns of your potential customers.

If you consider and implement these elements into your small business website design you will be taking a number of steps towards improving your online business’s effectiveness.