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. 

How To Find Hidden Spam Links In Your Website?

Every business owner is well aware that a website’s ranking on SERPs plays a vital factor in determining the online performance of the business. But your business’ search rank can be adversely affected by hidden spam links in your website. Hidden links in your website may be viewed as Black Hat SEO techniques that aim to manipulate your Search Engine Ranking. Google considers such deceptive techniques to be in violation of their Webmaster Guidelines and may penalize websites. Hence, finding and removing hidden spam links are important tasks for any website owner.

Where do spam links come from?

According to an article by searchenginejournal.com, hidden spam links may be placed on your site by malicious users or code. The following are some ways by which hidden spam links may find their way to your site:

• Links injected by hackers
• Improperly validated comments
• Unscrupulous Guest Posts
• Themes, Plug-ins and Widgets

Also, links with the same color as the background, hidden CSS formatting and single character links may also be considered spam. It is important to contact a competent website design services in case your website suffers from any of these problems.

But How To Detect Hidden Spam Links?

It is very important that you (or your website design company) analyze your site thoroughly to detect spam links. While it can be a highly technical and subtle task, the following are some methods that can help to detect hidden spam links:

Reviewing Site Files- The first thing you should do is to scrutinize your website files for signs of spam links. Such links may often be inserted into theme headers, footers and functions. These links may be further obscured using unnecessary JavaScript and style elements. Identify any irrelevant links and get rid of them.

Analyzing the Database- Often your site can be flooded with thousands of spam links generated by malicious database scripts. These links may affect all pages and posts on your site. To remove such links and underlying scripts you may need to edit your site using a Content Management System (CMS) like Wordpress or use database tools like PHPMyAdmin. Be advised that these are time consuming and technical methods, so you might want to engage the services of a website development company.

Using Web Developer- Web developer is a browser add-on that has multiple options using which you can analyze your site. Recommended by expert web design services, this add-on gives you the freedom to work with a range of elements. Once you install it and click on the gray gear icon in your browser, you will be presented with a number of choices. You can choose to disable styling and view the plaintext version of your site, or stop any malicious, link-injecting JavaScript code from running. If properly utilized, this add-on can help detect most hidden spam links in your site. Keep in mind that each page on your site must be carefully examined to remove suspicious links.

Using Link Grabber- Link Grabber is another browser add-on that can help by extracting all the links on your site page-by-page and creating a report.  This will enable you to spot any odd links on your site. After this is done, your website design service may want to run a full link audit using the following method.
JavaScript Link Audit- Once the suspicious links have been identified, your browser’s developer tools can be used to run a JavaScript code that will generate a report of all suspicious link elements on your site. Although many ready-made scripts are available online, it is best if you employ a web development company to audit your site properly.

Final Thoughts
A proper combination of the above techniques will surely help you find and remove hidden spam links on your site. Keep in mind however that all hidden elements are not created equal. It is perfectly legitimate to have hidden menus and elements which are necessary for ensuring the responsiveness of your site. While there are many automated tools that may be helpful to scan your site for unwanted links, it is always better to call on a website development company india to perform a proper link audit.