8 Ways to improve your small business website today

Posted on 04 Oct 2016 09:09 in Small Business Hacks
by Margi Mehta

This blog provides a tips and nuggets to make your small business website effective and result oriented.

Website is the visage of any small business or a start-up. Any web presence of your business, may it be a website, Facebook page or an Instagram profile, the primary purpose of it is to provide its users information about the product or services you provided. Any business needs to understand and observe its customers as closely as possible. Becuase more and more customers are getting involved in online shopping and dealing as compared to the local offline shopping.

 

People have slowly started trusting the online market and its products with respect to the easy of doing shopping and savings. They have started believing in the online services due to the positive reviews and feedback from other customers. This in turn puts a huge responsibility on the online trading corporations to give the best value to the customers in this increasing market competition today.

 

Here, as stated earlier, websites are the most important grounds through which any business can either improve or deteriorate. New methods have recently hit the market along with their unique and target oriented strategies in order to put their firm foot down in today’s highly competitive world. This suggests that any business website today; particularly the small businesses or the start-ups; should have dedicated focus on maintaining and regularly updating their websites. Here, constant monitoring over the website and its back-end is a must! Constant monitoring not only ensures the smooth functioning of the website but also creates a pathway to further improvement in it. Now, when you already have a well-functioning website, the sponge of your cake is already ready. Let us see some tiny but important tricks or methods for icing and decoration over the soft sponge of your delicious cake.

 

1. Don’t complicate your navigation in order to be over-creative
Navigation is one of the most influential paradigms for small business websites today. People always want to get their work done as quickly as possible when they land on your website. Hence, a clear, concise and quick navigation is the best way to do it.

 

2. Make your design responsive
Users are generally used to surfing their needs from their smart phones or any other handy devices such as a tab. It means that users use a range of varied sized devices in order to check on your small business website. If they do not feel the same comfort level at all places, then the authenticity of your website or your business may be questioned! The design must be compatible with respect to the gestures, touch styles and the functionality of the electronic device on which the website is to be viewed.

 

3. Provide a call to action buttons
Providing a call to action means that the website prompts the users to take certain actions in order to access the information or purchase your product/service by the click of a button. Other action could be playing a demo video, hearing audio excerpts from users, downloading information brochure, signing up for a free newsletter and much more. These activities make the website look lively and more interactive; which in turn helps gain more attention from the new and continuing user.

 

4. Keep updating images
Images fit into the users’ subconscious faster than the texts or other designs. On the contrary, images not only provide a visual sensation to the website but also connect the users with the content on the website. Images create a vibe on the users’ brain. Keep updating images as content change; this will keep website refresh.

 

5. Fast downloading website and perfectly functional links is important
Time is money! And who likes to lose money waiting for contents to load on your small business website? Practically no one! Also, all links on your website should be thoroughly tested that they are working as expected. A Broken link is bad for user impression as well as Search Engine rankings. 

 

6. Keep necessary and frequently visited information easily viewable.
People often search for what they want from any website more than casually taking a glance or an overview of your website. For example, there would be more people visiting your website in order to get the company’s contact details than to take a detailed look at the services provided. Under such circumstances, one of the easiest ways to make your website more user-friendly, you must always keep frequently retrieved information easily accessible through home page itself. 

 

7. Offer free resources in exchange of email
When people get something for free, they do not mind sharing their small details such as their phone number or email address or any of their other profile information with the company. This not only gets the company a powerful database but in-depth information regarding the customer’s buying trends and other such details will be of a huge benefit to the company from data analysis point of view. Moreover, it is a win-win situation for the company as well as the customers as both will be benefitted from it; so why not do it if it increases the customer engagement ratio?

 

8. Include testimonials
Testimonials should not be included on a separate page because I personally believe that people will not directly visit that page just to see what others think about your company. But psychologically speaking, human influences human. Hence, testimonial should be included on the all relevant pages of the website in such a way that the customers casually read or hear it while surfing for other details on your website. This not only mentally influences the visitors but also helps create a unique image in the customer’s mind about your business. Hence, testimonial; though not highlighted, should always be included in a small business website.

 

In a nutshell, one must focus on these nuggets about web design in order to accelerate the performance of any upcoming website. Few changes and modifications would surely lead to a brighter future.  

 

Closing Note: Budo is a leading cloud-based web development platform created with one goal in mind: to help people get online without technical skills and a big budget. Budo is a Website Builder and Content Management System.

        



About the author

Margi Mehta     
Content Writer. Completed my Bachelors in Computer Engineering and heading towards Santa Clara University, California for Masters in Information Systems. Passionate about penning down my thoughts on paper and unleashing new horizons.



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