7 Tips for Creating the Perfect Business Website
For businesses both large and small, having a centralized website where consumers can go to get information about your brand is crucial to your long-term success.
Most companies may not realize the importance of investing resources into their own branded website, but the benefits from increased traffic, more recognizability, and higher popularity across all platforms is hard to argue with.
While it’s quite simple to create a barebones website with little information or thought put into its design, benefits don’t pop up without first expending some effort. For businesses unsure of how to make the perfect brand website, here are 7 tips to get you started today.
1. Choose Your Website’s Domain Name
“If you’ve ever tried to buy a website, chances are someone else already had their hands on it,” says Deep Patel, founder of Owlmetrics, which provides Instagram analytics for businesses. “Not only is this a largely frustrating experience, but it can also be detrimental to a business trying to get their name out there.”
Having a website domain different from the actual name of your business can not only be confusing to customers interested in your brand, but it can also drive them away out of frustration, which just negatively impacts Internet traffic altogether. So, before considering anything else, try your hardest to procure the most accurate website domain name possible, because doing so will boost prolonged growth.
2. Select a Platform
Since website creation has become more and more popular, with individuals and small businesses needing easy ways to make their own online presences, there now exist several options for creating a branded business site.
According to John Rampton, the founder of Due and Calendar, services like WordPress and Squarespace are rather widespread as methods of simplifying website creation and putting it right in the hands of the site owner.
On the other hand, there also exists the option of using the classic methods of rolling up your sleeves and coding away in HTML. Chances are not everyone is versed in HTML code to the degree of being able to build appealing websites with ease, so you may need to hire someone for that last step.
3. Organize Your Website
After creating the framework of your website, it’s time to organize its elements in such a way that consumers visiting the site can easily move from one field to another, while understanding what they’re viewing. There are many ways to accomplish this, and what you ultimately pick will be determined by your brand’s personal marketing style. Some basic options include simple tabs at the top of the site, dynamic scrolling visuals, and tried-and-true use of left and right buttons.
Whatever you choose or end up designing, make sure that your website is organized with purpose; having done that, consumers will have a much better time gathering the information they need.
4. Craft a Recognizable Logo
Logos are everywhere. With the advent of online marketing and advertising campaigns, having an easy-to-remember face to a brand is critical for fostering success.
Since people today are always either in a hurry or less likely to retain all the information they consume on a daily basis, logos are much more effective than strings of words, because they are more easily recognizable than some brief marketing description wedged between lines in a newspaper.
Sure, verbal communication is paramount to marketing, but it is not nearly as memorable as branded visuals. For this reason, businesses should invest resources in eye-catching logos to reel in more and more customers to their website.
5. Make Everything Shareable
As stated before, today’s society is hard-wired with the frameworks of mass communication and social platforms. In that sense, people today mainly interact and engage with one another on a special set of popular platforms.
Therefore, although websites are important in their own right, piggybacking on the backs of larger platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and so on is the key to achieving greater brand visibility. An easy way to ensure this increased popularity is by making articles or pages on your website shareable to other platforms if possible. Being able to link articles from one website to another with vastly more viewers is a surefire way to increase traffic and brand awareness.
6. Invest in Quality
According to Richard Werbe, CEO of Studypool, one of the biggest pitfalls in marketing and beyond is opting to save money over investing in quality. There exists some misconception that buying cheaper materials or services will magically equate the performance of more expensive options; while there are cases of overpricing everywhere, this belief can still be largely detrimental to business owners, individuals, and companies alike.
Sometimes items may be more expensive as a result of their inherent greater quality or other beneficial factors. Regardless, investing in quality items can ensure greater product life or competition against close competitors, and this principle should not be ignored when dealing with creating a company website.
7. Keep it Simple
The final consideration when creating a website is this: to keep things simple. There may be an underlying temptation to pull out all the stops and create something equipped with all the coolest gadgets or features. However, the pursuit of such a creation can result in something needlessly complex and hard to navigate or understand for consumers.
Instead of aspiring for convoluted website designs and interfaces, first create a solid, but simple layout that accomplishes its purpose, then add on the extra features. Consumers will be much more satisfied with a plain design they can understand than with an impressive design they can’t even fathom.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
