Do not underestimate how important your website is to your business. It is the first place most people will go to when they want to know more about your business, and it is the place all your marketing material will point to. The last thing you need is a mediocre site that does not do your business any justice. Visitors to a site a pretty quick at determining whether or not your business is up to scratch. You generally have about five seconds to get your potential customer’s attention. Without a good site, you will lose out to your competitors. So, how do you build a great business website?

Plan

Every great site worked to a plan. Without a plan, pages will be posted in the wrong place, your headings will be disordered, your content will not be displayed in a way to get your customer’s attention, and a myriad of other potential problems. When it comes to creating a website plan, it helps if you understand your customer. Think about your customer’s journey as soon as they visit your site. What do they want? What pages will they want to view? How easy is it to find vital information? What offers do you have that will convert a visitor into a customer? Also, consider what you need your site to do, and the required functionality. Most sites need a shop, and many small businesses are not able to create this function satisfactorily. The good news is there are plenty of web builders such as WordPress, and you can usually purchase things such as WordPress Maintenance Plans to help you keep it updated if you struggle in this area. You need to get back to basics. Decide what needs to be on your site, how you are going to display it, and the functionality required. If you can answer all these questions, then you will be able to design a site that suits your customer’s needs. 

Your Brand

Branding is essential to your business. If you have not spent time creating a great brand, then perhaps you need to do this. At the very basic level, a brand will give you a logo and a color scheme to which your site can adhere too. However, a brand is far more than this. A brand is about your company ethos, your reason for being, your philosophy, and your core values. A brand can help you homogenize all your content together with one larger overriding theme. For example, if sustainability is important to your business, then all your individual pages can be written in a style that emphasizes this key point. All your content will then be in harmony. It will come across as more fluent and trustworthy too. Be careful not to repeat points though. You need to show the customer something different every time. Imagine each page as a piece of the puzzle.

Does it Display on Cellphones

There is no point in having a great website that looks awesome on desktops but does not shrink down and display well on mobile devices. Most people use their phones these days, so it must look good on a cellphone, or you will lose trade. The good news is most web builders already have the mobile display setting included. So, if you choose to use one of these, all you’ll need to do it check it’s working as it should be.

Page Speed

Noting turns a customer off faster than a slow site. If it takes more than about two seconds to load, the likelihood is they have already clicked off. So, you need to test all pages, especially the home page for speed. If it is slow, you could try taking off superfluous large content such as gifs. You could reduce the size o the images you are using. You can optimize all pages too. Can you remove any plug-ins? Page speed is 

The Content

Once a customer has arrived at your site, the first thing they will see is content. You need to make sure that any text is focused and to the point. No one has the time to read through pages of text, even if it is Shakespeare. So, simplicity and preciseness is the name of the game. You also need the images, videos, gifs, plug-ins, blogs, etc., all to be relevant. A page about a certain type of shoe, for example, with an image of a horse, will make no sense, no matter how beautiful the horse is. People will wonder what the horse means and detract from your message.