5 Vital Steps to Designing a Great Small Business Website

A well-designed website is important for small businesses, entrepreneurs, or anybody wanting to sell goods or services online. The key to attracting new customers is allowing your prospects to easily find you through a quick search on any of the popular search engines. 

To put it simply, when you are selling products/services online, the website is an extension of your business card. It provides your potential customers all the important details regarding your business, the location of your store (if any) and also lets them know about your latest marketing campaign. However, creating a business website is easier said than done. But, the entire process can seem less challenging if you have availed of professional website design services. 

Now, there are a few steps that are crucial to building an attention-grabbing small business website. Understanding these steps will make it easier for you to work with a professional website design company. Keep reading to know those steps. 

1. Decide the purpose of your business website 

The first and foremost step is to decide what you want the website to do for you. It might be a static website that you are creating for giving potential customers information about your products/services and credentials. Or, you might want a dynamic website where you would be adding new content periodically and want visitors to subscribe for such information. You might want to encourage visitors to buy your products or avail of your services. 

Knowing what you want is important because this will guide website designers to develop your business website and decide on the functionalities, CTAs, content types, user journey, and so on. 

2. Select a content management system (CMS)

A CMS or content management system refers to a web application that helps you with the creation, as well as, editing and management of content on your website. Some of the popular CMS’ are Joomla, Magento, Drupal, Tumblr, WordPress, and Wix. You can talk to a website design company to find out about the features of each of these CMS’ so that you can make an informed decision. 

3. Get the perfect domain and choose stable hosting 

The next step is to decide on a unique domain name (web address). The domain name should be easy to remember, catchy and good for SEO (search engine optimization). It should be relevant to your business. 

Once you’ve decided on the domain name, you need to choose a web host. A web host is a remote location where your business website and all the related software will be held and also made available to your target audience. Your choice of a web host would depend on the number of visitors that you are expecting to receive and the speed of the website. 

4. The design phase 

If you want to drive visitors, you need a website that is engaging and interesting. You would want the design of your website to be relevant and memorable so that visitors keep coming back. Before the actual design starts, a business website design company will provide you with wireframes of your website. These are skeletal pages that will be focusing on offering an intuitive user journey. Once you’ve agreed on the wireframes, they will be passed to the graphic designer who will begin designing your website. 

5. Developing website content and using images 

Content and images can make or break your website. If the images used are blurred or irrelevant, your website is not going to impress your visitors. The same goes for poorly crafted website content. The content must be easy to scan and written in an easily comprehensible language. Jargon must be avoided. 

Besides these, your website needs to have a responsive design so that your potential customers can view your website on their desktop, laptop, or smartphone. 

You can get started on creating your small business website by collaborating with a professional website design company.