Building a Website For Business Marketing
Websites are crucial to any business’ online marketing. With so many of them being created every day, it is important to know how to design and build one correctly.
Building a well put together website ensures that it will not get lost among the millions of others already created. Here are some website design tips to make sure you are on the right track.
Navigation and Design
Making your website easy to navigate is very important. Even after putting in all of the work building, if it isn’t easy to navigate, you’re placing a limit on how much business you can generate.
Home Page
Your website is like your online store. It needs to be organized and lead traffic to what you want customers to see. Your homepage is the best place to start. A good website needs to have a homepage that describes the business and popular products. It also can direct traffic to where they can find questions, ask questions, and learn more. Information such as this and store hours, prices, services, etc should be found on the homepage leading to secondary pages that have more information. Your homepage is what sells customers on your website and your business.
There is no solid answer to the amount of text or the number of pictures your homepage should have. The main question you are trying to answer when creating your homepage is whether or not you have included all important information in a way that is organized and easy-to-follow.
SEO
This blog does not focus on SEO (Search engine Optimization) too much, but it is essential to building a website. Making sure that your text and imagery are keyword-optimized is useful for on-page SEO. This is important when you are beginning to build your website. If you are looking for a better description of how you can use SEO to build your website check out our blog, Using SEO to Drive Business.
Design
Design brings to mind a lot of different elements, but your website needs to bring together one overall look. Websites are constantly getting better. With professional website builders, services, and templates available, it is easy to build a well-designed website. Your design needs to reflect your business, but not take away the navigational ease on your website. Creating a template or design and using that as a base is a great way to make sure your website flows smoothly from page to page. Focusing on the design of pop-ups and forms on your website is a good next step once you get the basic layout. When creating these pop-ups, you need to keep in mind the way they look and make sure they are strategically placed. Putting popups on your homepage right away is a start, but placing them when a customer clicks on a product, for example, is a great way to have targeted pop-ups on your website.
Another part of design is imagery. Pictures are a great way to display your business’ message. However, there is a right and wrong way to use pictures on a website. Adding pictures will slow it down, and bad-quality images can have a negative affect on visitors. Your site needs to be fast for SEO purposes and so visitors do not get upset. When adding imagery, make sure to compress photos and run speed tests on your website so that you know your it is operating at full speed. Tools such as Google Page Speed Insights are great ways to test your website.
Overall, your design needs to be appealing and thought out. The design could be a make or break with customers. It gives your company an edge if your website looks clean. If you can optimize the design of your website and keep it easy to navigate then the traffic you receive is more likely to become business.