Building a comprehensive business website is a significant investment for your company, and as such, should be designed with your business growth in mind. CSS Light outlines how to design a site that fits your unique business needs and effectively conveys your message.

Designing Your Website

According to Business News Daily, there are key fundamental elements of any good business website. This includes ease of access and useability and directing visitors to key areas of interest without forcing them to drill down via numerous clicks. Your site should also clearly define what your company is, what you do, how what you do benefits the customer, and how you can be contacted.

You might also feature a newsfeed, links to social media sites, a shopping cart function if you make on-site sales, and a blog to demonstrate your thought leadership and expertise in your particular industry. You can also encourage site visitors to sign up for digital communication through your site, or bookmark it for return visits.

Build For Today and Tomorrow

Due to the expense and time investment of building a website, many small businesses decide to go with a “starter site” they can augment at some point in the future. While this can work in theory, you're much better served to have a fully developed professional site built that incorporates all the elements you'll need as your company continues to grow. In particular, Cleo notes that it's vital to integrate your customer relationship management tools with your enterprise resource planning systems.

Your website should work with your internal tools to optimize your internal process. Even if you don’t go live with certain pages or features right away, you’ll have them on standby for when the time comes. Also, build in such a way that you can make minor updates and changes as a “back-end user” without having to go back to a designer.

Drive Traffic to Your Site and Use Google Analytics

All of your marketing functions should be designed with an eye toward customer cultivation. As such, it's important to understand how search engine optimization - SEO - works. You can use Google Analytics to track the keywords that drive traffic to your site and utilize them throughout your materials to continue generating traffic. Recognizing how customers use your site is also critical to ensuring you understand which pages are most often visited and least visited, which can help you with strategy.

Creating a well-designed logo for your business and your site is another way to build a strong first impression. Rather than paying for logo design services, you can use an online logo maker to develop a creative logo of your own. Simply choose a styling icon and augment it with verbiage, then view an assortment of logos and change up their fonts and colors to meet your needs.

Get Site Feedback

Once you have a wireframe and key functions of your website operational, employ the assistance of someone to test your site by giving them specific directives. This is called a “usability test.” For example, you may say, go to the website and fill out a customer interest form, or try to create an account, retrieve account information, or place an order. Having someone unfamiliar with your system from the outside test drive your website will help you identify areas where you need to be more streamlined or efficient, or add additional information that would be useful to the customer experience.
A high-functioning website is a key marketing tool for a small business, and being able to integrate your social media functions, customer relationship management, product ordering and inventory, and other key operational elements will help ensure you're getting your money’s worth out of this important tool..

CSS Light showcases and promotes new talents and trends in the world of designing. Contact us today for more info!