As a small business owner, you need a website that’s as eye-catching and engaging as a Fortune 500 company’s website, but without the cost. If you want to gain more customers and traffic to your site, you don’t have to spend a lot of money. All you have to do is understand your clients’ preferences and behaviors.
Of course, each company is different, so your customers will look different from, say, our customers. However, it’s safe to say that potential customers want four things from a website:
- CLEAN & PROFESSIONAL DESIGN
- SIMPLE & INTUITIVE NAVIGATION
- INFORMATIVE & WELL-WRITTEN CONTENT
- MOBILE-FRIENDLINESS
CLEAN & PROFESSIONAL DESIGN
Have you ever left a website—never to return—because you didn’t like the way it looked? If your site looks too busy or dated, your customers won’t spend much time learning about your company and its services.
But what constitutes good design? The answers can vary, but these three rules are universal:
- Color palette: The colors on your website should reflect your branding, but they shouldn’t be overpowering. Choose colors that display well on a computer screen, and avoid colors that are too bright or too dark. In addition, too many colors can overwhelm your customers. Choose one main color and two accent colors, and use those accent colors sparingly.
- Text: Too much text and no one will read your content; too little and your content won’t answer anyone’s questions. 300 words minimum per page is a good guideline to follow—that’s actually the number Google recommends to improve your SEO. Keep in mind that your customers will scan your content rather than read it closely. To help them scan, keep your sentences short, use headings and subheadings, and divide your content into bulleted or numbered lists.
- Modern & professional: Think of the image your business wants to portray, and choose a website design that portrays that image. To appear organized and modern, choose a design that looks current rather than one that looks like it’s straight out of the 1990s. To portray professionalism, select a template with clean lines, understated graphic elements, and smart use of white space.
SIMPLE & INTUITIVE NAVIGATION
The information on your website is important, so it should be as easy to find as possible. If customers can’t figure out how to get from point A to point B, they might leave your site and never come back. Follow the “three-click rule:” anyone visiting your site should be able to find what they’re looking for in as few as three clicks.
Your customers should always know where they are and where to go next. Make sure your home page is easy to navigate to, no matter where your customers end up on your site.
INFORMATIVE & WELL-WRITTEN CONTENT
The content on your website needs to answer your customers’ questions or concerns in a straightforward and easy-to-read way. Here are some tips for writing engaging and informative content:
- Closely edit your writing and ask at least one other person to edit your writing, too
- Think of the questions your customers regularly ask and try to answer those questions in your content
- Divide up your text with headings, subheadings, and numbered or bulleted lists
- Make sure your contact information is visible on every page
- Include calls-to-action (CTAs) on every page to tell your customers how to take the next step
- Write to the point and avoid unnecessary fluff
MOBILE-FRIENDLINESS
Mobile Internet traffic has outpaced desktop traffic, so if your website doesn’t look and function just as great on a smartphone or tablet as it does on a laptop or desktop, people won’t visit it. All of the principles we’ve talked about so far are just as important on mobile.
Dsolutions.no does the hard work of building the perfect small and big business website for you. To begin, browse our website, call or chat with us about your questions.
Once we build your website, all you have to do is keep it updated.