What A Small Business Website Needs
Effective Content
Your small business website content should be relevant to your business. It may sound obvious, but it’s easy for content to get outdated. If your products or services have changed at all, then the site should reflect that.
Home Page Look and Feel
Your visitors should easily be able to understand what your business or organization is. Does the look match your branding and style? Is it appealing enough to make you want to continue on the site?
Call to Action
Be sure you have a strong call to action if you want your users to go make a donation, browse through other pages, contact you, fill out a form.
Good Images
Clean beautiful images can visually enhance a website. We use client images as well as stock images like stock.adobe.com. Whether you use stock or company images depends on the type of site, and the visitors you expect.
For nonprofit websites, I’ve used stock photos of people and families, for testing to increase the chance donating. For landscaping websites, company photos from their projects can be featured, giving a clear view of the company’s work.
SEO
Search engine optimization is about getting good visibility in search results when someone is searching for your products or servicse. This ties back into effective content since Google and other search engines will return results based on your content. Title tags and META descriptions and images containing essential keywords should be on every page, clearly describing the page or post, and should tie in with the content of the page.
Targeting and Focus
I’ve found that successful SEO takes time to work. Determine your goals and target keywords for your business. Analyze your competition to see where you fit in currently, and where you’d like to be in search results.
Other factors also impact these results including the websites URL, the age of the domain, headings, and HTML structure along with many other items. Externally you can enhance SEO using social media, advertising and email marketing, among others.
Tracking and Reporting
Don’t forget to track and analyze your website traffic. It will help determine where website visitors are going within your site, when they’re leaving, and how many visitors go to your website.
Responsive Website
Responsive web design responsive web design will enhance the users’ experience and keep people on your site longer since your website will display well on any device.
Blog
Having a blog that’s regularly updated will help keep your site fresh which ties into SEO success. Search engines will index your website often if it’s regularly updated. Adding blog posts will keep your customers current with what’s going on, and relevant in search results.
Easy Maintenence
If you can edit a Word document, you’ll be comfortable editing your WordPress website. Most websites we build are with WordPress, which is a great CMS (content management system) and is perfect for blogging. The WordPress administration is easy to use, so there’s little excuse not to update your website when needed.
We build can build custom WordPress themes for clients or use some of our off-the-shelf templates. WordPress provides the flexibility to add functionality, keep your site secure, and has an active community of developers which provides a strong foundation.
Web Developer
We are here for you! When you get into trouble or are confused about your website. We do updates for clients of all abilities, from those that don’t want to spend the time, to those that don’t care to learn the website administration interface. We also make sure your website is updated and secure with the latest software updates.