great tips for your business website.
When you have a business, it needs an excellent website to succeed. Otherwise, you will be missing out on a lot of potential business. Knowing how to create that website is something that the experts will always be able to help you with, and you can certainly outsource the job if you prefer. However, if you want to do it by yourself, here are some great tips to help you make the very best website you can that will persuade people to buy from you and turn your business into a true success.
What Is Your Goal?
Every website needs to have a clear goal attached to it so that you can point people in the direction you want and need them to go in. Your website will serve a different purpose to someone else’s, and therefore you need it to be unique and also accurate.
Is your goal to:
- Provide additional information?
- Offer an e-commerce platform?
- Help people?
Once you know what your overall aim is when it comes to your website, it will be far easier to build one that works in the way you want it to.
Write Content
A website with no content will never impress, no matter how fancy it might be otherwise. So, what do you want your website to say? You may feel that you aren’t able to write down exactly what you want in the way you want it, but that shouldn’t be something that stops you from trying; once you have the necessary information in place, you can hire a third party freelancer to polish it up for you.
Having a blog is a great way to add good quality content to your site. You can really make this section your own and include all the information that has no other place. After all, you want the home page and other pages on your website to be clear, clean, and concise.
Explain What You Do
The more clearly you can explain exactly what it is you do for your customers, the more likely they are to understand and then book with you or buy from you. This is especially important if you have spent a lot of money to get to this point, for example, as you can then start to make the money back more quickly. A courier service might have opted for motorcycle loans to purchase the vehicles they need; a plumber may have spent a lot of money on training and equipment; an accountant may have quit a regular job in order to run their own business, and much more besides.
Having a clear website that does easily explain how you can help people is the quickest way to start recouping these costs and build up a successful, trusted business.
Use Calls To Action
Calls to action are critical and should be used wisely on your website. If you write a blog, always end it with a good call to action, for example. These are not hard to write, and will remind your visitors why they have come to your website, and what they need to do next (phone, book an online appointment, buy something from you) in order to move forward.
You may not think that these calls to action are really needed, but people can become very distracted when they are using the internet, and you have probably been in the same position where you have been browsing online and got carried away with clicking through to other sites and pages, rather than concentrating on what you were there for in the first place. Reminding people that they can and should take action will keep them with you, and they will be more likely to take the next step.
Get Inspiration
You might not be sure of exactly how to create your pages, and what they should look like or what information they should contain. If this is the case, get inspiration from looking at other websites that offer similar services to you, or at those websites you enjoy using and that you would go back to time and again. These are the ones that are clearly doing something right, and working out what that is, and then doing something similar, can help move you forward.
Remember, you must not take your inspiration too far; don’t plagiarise another website and don’t make it look too similar. This will be potentially confusing, and will also give you a bad reputation for copying what others are doing. Make your website unique, but take the best ideas and use them in your own special style and you will be successful.
A Good Domain Name
It is also hugely important to buy a good domain name for your website. If you can, it should be the same as your business name; this will make it easier to remember and ensure that no one gets mixed up and goes to a different website when they had intended to find yours.
However, sometimes your business name may not work as a website, or it could already be taken. In this case, you will need to think laterally. What can you do to make your website name easy to remember and still make sense? You might use .co.uk rather than .com, for example, or you can add your location so that not only will people be sure of who they are clicking onto, but you will more easily find local business.
Be Personal
Whether your website is being built for personal reasons or business ones, adding a face to the site can be helpful. People like to buy from people, so showing that you are real and that you are the one behind everyone can help them to feel as though they really know you, and they will be more willing to stay on your site and even make a purchase.
Add some personal information about why you started the site – or your business in general – ensuring that you don’t give too much information about yourself away as this can be a mistake when it comes to hackers.