5 must-haves in a small business website
When potential customers go looking for your business online, they’re generally expecting to find your website. From there, consumers expect several things from your website, including visual appeal and ease of navigation.
Pryzm has put together a list of ‘must-haves’ for a small business website to be successful; from design to usability, here they are.
1. Visual Appeal
Because of the lack of face-to-face interaction over the internet, many are suspicious of businesses they find online. Professional graphic design goes a long way to highlight your credibility as a business in cyberspace. With a professional online identity, your website visitors will trust your business a lot more and be more inclined to get in contact and potentially purchase your product.
2. A clear and easy way of navigating your website
Although visual appeal is paramount to credibility, ease of use of the website is just as crucial to see results. Whether people are looking for contact details, a list of services, a menu, a blurb about your business or more, it must be ready to be easily found. The best way of doing this is to have a navigation menu bar at the top of the site on each page.
3. A physical location and contact details
Again, credibility is everything with a website. If your business doesn’t state how to find you, people can become suspicious of whether something is being hidden. Even if you can’t disclose your exact location, mentioning your suburb, city or country location can go a long way to make people feel more comfortable with your brand.
4. An easily actionable call-to-action
Ask yourself; what is my business aiming to achieve with its website? If you’re looking for people to contact you, have your phone number and email address easily findable across all your pages. If it’s online sales, the website should constantly point to a catalogue of your products and if store visits are the goal, prominently feature your address and imagery of your business’ venue across the majority of your site.
5. SEO-Ready
If you consider yourself a web rookie, you probably won’t know what this means. Being SEO-ready means indexing each and every page on your website ensures that your business can be found on Google by the relevant people looking for you. It can be a tedious task, but it pays off long term; especially if you want to be competitive on the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) front and appear higher on Google. It also helps to have the site mobile friendly, among many other factors.