Your business website is your most powerful business and marketing tool. When done correctly your website enhances your professional image, invokes trust and credibility, and establishes your business’s relevance online.
As a business owner, your website is an essential component to the way in which you operate your business. Therefore, you need your business website to have a powerful online presence that captures the attention of your audience and helps you to grow your business.
Ready to get your business website working for you, instead of against you? Schedule a consultation or request a free web design quote here.
The Top 10 Things Your Business Website Should Have
- PROFESSIONAL UP-TO-DATE DESIGN
Your website is your #1 marketing tool and your businesses greatest asset. It is working for you 24/7, 365 days years. Therefore, it is imperative that you maintain your website and keep it up-to-date with the forever evolving website design, search engine, and security standards.
These means having a beautiful website that is easy to navigation, while functioning and flowing seamlessly across all devices and browsers. Ugly, unresponsive, outdated website are not only visually unappealing, but ineffective. They distract from the value of what your business has to offer and result in a loss of credibility with your online audience.
- COHESIVE BRANDING
Maintaining a cohesive, or consistent, brand is essential to having other remember and recognize your business. This also helps your business to look more professional and trustworthy. In order to maintain consistent branding, you will want to incorporate a unified theme across your website, social media, and marketing materials.
- PROMINENT CALL-TO-ACTIONS
Think of your website like a map and include call-to-action buttons that tell your website visitors what to do next. Call-to-actions should be obvious, concise, easy to spot, and they should direct customers to complete a designated task. To determine the best call-to-actions for your business, you first need to determine what you want your website visitors to do. Whether you want them to purchase a service or product, sign up for a newsletter, share content to social media, download something, contact you by phone or with an online form, etc.
- UNIQUE AND MEMORABLE DOMAIN NAME
Investing in a domain name adds credibility to your business online, by making your business look more professional. Having your own domain name shows online users that you are not only up-to-date with technology, but that you are willing to invest in your own business; which positions your business as being more trust worthy. Your domain name can also help to establish your brand. If you chose a domain name that matches your business name, it will make it easier for returning customers to find you again.
- RELEVANT BUSINESS INFORMATION
Make sure your business contact information is accurate, up-to-date, and easy to spot. This means placing your contact details in obvious locations throughout your website, such as the footer, header, or contact page. Website visitors should not have to hunt for your phone number, email address, physical address, business hours, etc.
- CLEAR MESSAGE AND UNIQUE SELLING POINT
Use concise image and descriptions that enable website visitors to immediately determine, at just a glance, what it your business has to offer, whether it is a specific set of services or products. Your website should also prominently highlight your business’s unique selling point. Your unique selling point is what sets your business apart from your competition, it tells website visitors why they should do business with you instead of continuing their online search. The unique selling point is imperative to keeping website visitors on your website, rather than clicking back to the search results.
Ready to kick start your website design project? Contact us today, for a free web design consultation.
- QUALITY CONTENT
Content is everything, when it comes to building a strong web presence. Your website content should be relevant and useful to your website visitors. It should not only promote a clear message of intent, but also be is easy to understand and speak directly to the customer. You will also want to ensure your content is well organized, to maximize conversions. Do this by utilizing whitespace, headings, lists and visual elements that help to break your content up so that it is more digestible and visually appealing for website visitors.
- INTERNAL LINKS
Internal linking is a powerful and easy to learn component of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). So, easy in fact that literally anyone can learn to quickly master it. So, what is internal linking? Glad you asked, it is the act of linking one page of your website to another page, in your website. This method is used to improve the users’ online experience by providing them with additional information that is relevant to the content they are already looking at. Internal linking helps to direct the traffic flow within your website and provides your website visitors with useful information on topics, services, or products they are already interested in. For example, including a “Related Products” or “Related Posts” section on your website is a form of internal linking.
- APPLICABLE SECURITY
If you accept online payments for products and/or services through your website, then you must ensure your website is PCI compliant. In addition, if your business requires you to collect, store, or transmit personal or sensitive information about your customers or clients you need to ensure that information is secure and safeguarded against potential cyber security breaches. For example, medical practices must ensure any online patient portals are HIPAA compliant.
- SOCIAL MEDIA ICONS
Almost every business can benefit from some type of social media presence. After having determined the best social media platforms for your business, be sure to include the relevant social media icons to your website. This is not only good for SEO but, also makes it easier for your customers to connect with your business on a more personal level and stay up-to-date with your business.
If you are consistently posting content to your website, whether via a blog or portfolio, then adding social-sharing buttons is essential. Providing your readers with an easy way to share the information they connect with on their social media platforms is crucial to getting your content seen by a wider audience.
Get a Professionally Designed Website
Your business website is an integral part of your business; therefore, it is imperative that your website is effective. How do you know if your website is effective? Easy. If it is NOT benefiting your business and helping you to be more successful, than it is not effective.
When a website is no longer working for you, but rather against you – it is definitely time for a change. Here at Poser Designs we stay up-to-date with the latest in web design, development, SEO, and security standards. We focus on building websites that are effective and help businesses to be more successful online. Our approach to creating and developing business websites focuses on more than aesthetics, we believe in creating a balance between beauty and functionality, that gets you real results.
Ready, to take the next step to online success? Contact us today and let us help you create an effective business website, that is more successful online.
