The vast majority of things are now done online. Advertising, communicating, and even business transactions. We live in a world now where the latest news and notifications are sent directly to our smartphones, and we can email on the go, at ease, no matter where in the world we are. It goes without saying, that therefore if you have a business, promoting it and conducting it online is a perfect way to get yourselves well known and to run business effectively, but what really makes the perfect website? These top tips will help you craft the ideal website for your business, whatever that may be.
Have a Strategy
Before you think about designing anything, you’ll have to consider what your online strategy will be:
– Depending on what your business is, you’ll have a different target audience so remember that it’s vitally important to cater your website to whoever this may be.
– Remember that your website needs to have a purpose. You’ll have to consider how the website will help you to reach your business goals, and whether or not it’s a profitable website directly, or whether it’s more for publication.
– Set goals. How does the website tie into the goals of your company? For example, if it’s a social media company, it would be presumable that you’d want as many users on your website as possible, so keep the end goal in sight at all times and strive for it.
– Remember that the bigger your website is, the more money that it will cost. Therefore, review your finances and decide how important the size of your website is in relation to your business.
– Decide on whether the website is interactive for users or not. A good way of using it as interactive is using your website for feedback and as a means of customer contact for queries and so on.
Plan Your Set Up
Before you begin setting up, make a plan:
– Will your website be in-house, or will you apply to contract an internet service provider to host and update your website? It really depends on the level of involvement you want in your website. If you’re not the most technical minded of people, but you really want to get your business on the web, fear not! Companies such as RankWarrior are readily available online to give some guidance and their expertise on marketing.
– If you’re planning on using your website for sales and transactions, you’ll have to ensure that your internet service provider can give a secure server that handles transactions effectively.
– You’ll also have to appoint someone to be the contact response person for your website. In short, you’ll need to appoint someone, whether that be an employee or yourself, that will be responsible for responding to emails from people who’ve visited the website. The recommended response time given is twenty-four hours or less, so to make a success of it you’ll have to ensure the person responsible for this is reliable and efficient.
Think About Your Content
Finally, one of the more exciting parts of getting your business online is actually designing and creating the website itself. It’s important however, to also think carefully about the content of your website:
– Think about how you’ll split your website up into categories and sections, and what the main ones will be. You’ll also have to consider how these then link to sub-sections, and how these will possibly link back to business products.
– Think about who your online competitors are, and try to always be one notch above, and one step ahead of them. In a way looking at your competitors can help you out. You can learn a lot about what you do and don’t want your website to look like by looking at your competitors.
– Consider the text and graphics on your website, and how you will design (or have these designed) to look attractive and unique to your own company. You’ll also need to consider whether you want photographs on your website, and what these will be of. As the company owner, do you want your photo to feature, or possibly an image of your business HQ? What about photographs of your own products? It’s advisable to hire a photographer with experience in this field to ensure that these pictures present you and your business in the best possible light.
– It’s important to consider how searchable your website is for users. If you want them to be able to access and find it easily, make sure there are key words that link to your website.
