What to include for a great small business website

Whether you are an attorney, own a salon, a yoga studio, or have another type of small business, a great website is crucial for your overall success. As a web designer who has worked on building or marketing over 100 small business websites, we know what it takes to create great and engaging business websites.

If you are looking to build a new startup website or make your current site more effective, here are what it takes to get started and help your small business website compete effectively in the online marketplace.

There’s value in a good domain name.

Your domain name, also known as your website address, is often the entry point to your site. It is important that it makes a good impression for usability purposes, as well as for search engine optimization (SEO).

Web hosting is more important than you’d think.

A website hosting provider is a company that offers the technology and services necessary for a website to be viewed on the internet. You connect your domain name to your hosting provider so that when users visit your website address, they are shown your website that you store on your hosting account.

Hosting services can cost anywhere between $2 to $100+ per month, depending on the kind of technology and support you choose. You can usually get a discount if you purchase a yearly plan as opposed to a monthly plan.

Create a beautiful, engaging website with content appropriate to the services your business (or you) provide

Make sure your small business website interface leaves a positive impression that drives results. You can do so by implementing the following suggestions:

  • Use beautiful graphics and easy-to-read fonts.
  • Make sure your graphics are compressed and optimized for fast loading. If your website is slow, search engines like Google will penalize your ranking.
  • Research the competition to see how they have designed and optimized their websites; implement similar components that will work for your small business website.
  • Research your target audience to see what they want from your site and make it easy for them to accomplish it.
  • Stay consistently on-brand throughout your website design.
  • Design an intuitive navigation system which allows users to get to the pages they need quickly.
  • Publish easily accessible contact information.
  • Incorporate obvious call-to-actions (especially “buy now” buttons).
  • Create pages that are standard for small business websites, such as:
    • Home
    • About us
    • Products/Services (with descriptions and visually appealing images)
    • Sitemap (for SEO purposes)
    • Management team
    • Contact us
    • Terms of use (the online contract governing how users can use your site)
    • Privacy policy
    • Additional pages relevant to your specific small business

If you need help building a site for your small business or optimizing a site you already have, connect with us.