What should a small business website look like? Once you know what the important elements of a small business website should be, this will make it easier to work out how your website should look and what pages you need to include. Below is a list of elements and features that most small Canberra business websites should be integrating into their design. At Neondragonfly Web Design I offer Canberra Web Design services that are inclusive of most of these website features.
Without a well-designed and organised navigation bar your website visitors will find it difficult to traverse pages on your website. Preference should be to have a horizontal menu bar rather than vertical menu – except of course on mobile devices where space is limited, then a user friendly vertical menu should be used with sufficient spacing between links. There should also be a hierarchical order of links with the most important page links placed leftmost and least important rightmost.
Other considerations would be:
This may come as a surprise but your website is not for you; it is for your potential clients, the end user, in essence the people for which your website is intended. This means you should aim for the best UX (user experience) possible by making sure your website displays and functions correctly on most mobile devices. The layout and navigation should be intuitive, uncluttered with clearly defined call to actions that encourage the visitor to take an action like: making contact, requesting a quote, using a form, make a phone call or finding further information.
Your business name, address and phone commonly referred to as NAP should be consistent, not only from page to page but across all online references to your business known as citations. This also helps with local SEO and makes sure the visitor can reach you from any page. You should also have a dedicated contact page with full contact details and an enquiry form.
Your website about page can be one of most visited page on any website, yet it tends to be the most neglected. This page should give a summary of who you are, your company history and experience. The about page is a great opportunity to show the face and personality behind your business. Aim to connect with potential clients through your brand and story.
A blog is not just something for larger companies, if fact having a blog on your actual website demonstrates that you are active in your business and shows your expertise and knowledge about your industry. A blog also provides you with the opportunity to add fresh content to your website which is a huge benefit in terms of SEO. Make sure you organise your posts into categories and that blog posts are arranged in reverse chronological order ( latest articles at the top of the page). Be smart about using keywords in blog headings and break your posts into shorter paragraphs using subheadings. And don’t forget to use a catchy image or use infographics. See more about why a blog is important for your small business.
Your website should bring focus to elements like testimonials, customer reviews, awards and accreditations, affiliations, memberships and examples of your work. Most people will make the decision to hire you or purchase your product based on customer reviews – especially after reading google reviews, so encouraging new and existing customers to leave a review on your google business listing – don’t have a Google my business listing – get one ASAP! Seriously.
You should be active on at least 2 social media accounts, as social signals play an important part in optimising your website and developing trust, authority and gaining additional website traffic. Social share buttons may be placed closer to the top of the page, however direct links to your social media channels should go towards the bottom of the page as you want to keep visitors on your website, then if they choose they can click through to your social profiles.
Many web design agencies use Wordpress; the popular open source content management for all kinds of business websites. However having a one size fits all arrangement that is offered by this CMS introduces complications and can be very time consuming for many small business owners to use and more often than not requires additional staff training and steep learning curves.
A CMS (content management system) interfaces with your websites back-end and is used to edit and make other changes to your website and should be as easy as updating a word document. At Neondragonfly Web Design I offer a bespoke CMS; this is a fully customised system that can be tailor made for your business, it very easy to update your website – which would typically include editing or adding text, uploading and managing images, adding blog posts or adding custom data to a dynamic web page.
Website security should be taken seriously. ALL websites these days should have an SSL certificate installed by their web host. SSL secures the connection between your website visitors browser and your website, any data that is sent between the client and the server with be encrypted. SSL instils a sense of trust with your website visitors and search engines alike. Also worth a mention:
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO as it is commonly referred to, is the processes involved in helping your website get found through search engines. SEO is something that must be implemented from the very beginning of your website design and well past website launch. SEO is not set and forget, it must be an ongoing strategy for every small business website.
There are different types of SEO on-page SEO is about keyword choice and optimising your website content and off-page which is more about getting relevant & authoritative websites to link back to yours. SEO is a very complex area of digital marketing but something that small business owners must have at least a basic understanding of in order to cultivate healthy website performance.
