10
Mar

grow

Website design for the small business

Posted by Aaron Brockhurst

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The Internet has become a part of nearly everyone's daily lives. If your business doesn't have its own website then you are potentially missing out on opportunities and setting yourself behind competitors. Setting up a website can be a simple process but you'll need to give some key areas some thought before starting.

Here are a few tips to get started on setting up a successful website

  • Contact information: This may sound ridiculously obvious, but you would be surprised at how often people forget that they need to include all forms of contact to make them reachable by anyone who visits their website. Remember different people like different forms of communication, so include a phone number, email and an address. It can also be useful to have a contact form on your websites; customers often prefer this method because it is simple.
  • Colour scheme and overall theme: You want your website to have a consistent look and feel, if your pages are all different and look like they do not belong to the same website then there is a problem. You need to establish what colours, fonts and layouts you want on your website before beginning the designing process. 
  • An impressive and memorable logo: Your logo is a big deal, it should be the most memorable thing about your business, when you think of a big brand such as Starbucks, the first thing that comes to mind is their green logo, this is the power you want your logo to be generating. There are no rules or guidelines to creating a good logo, it takes time and lot of though, the best place to start would be brainstorming lots of different ideas and then work through them until you find something that clicks. 
  • Responsive website: It has now become essential to have a website that is responsive because many people now regularly use mobile and tablet devices to access the web. If your website is not compatible with all mobiles, tablets and browsers then you are essentially losing many visitors. 
  • Optimised content: Optimising your content is important for your ranking in search engines, if you don't optimise your website then people are not going to pick up on your page through their searches.
  • Simple text: Be concise and avoid writing loads of unnecessary rubbish, remember most visitors won't even read all your text, most people skim through when viewing a website. If your website has short and concise pieces of text then you can choose just the important messages that you want visitors to see, because short pieces of text have more chance of being read. 
  • Fast loading speed: No one likes a website that takes a long time to load, the easiest way to reduce loading times is by reducing the size of your files, things such as images are a common cause of slow loading pages.
Your website is one of the first things people see when looking at your business. Creating the right first impression with your target audience and capturing their interest is essential. For more information or to arrange an evaluation of your website speak to one of our experts on Tel:0845 258 1208