Business Tips from SCORE: A website is an absolute must
These days having a website for your small business is an absolute must. It’s often the first place current and potential customers will turn to learn about your company and its offerings.
It is the front door of your business.
Creating an attractive, accessible and informative website can expand your reach and bring in new audiences. There are many tools to help you create a website on your own, but it may be worth hiring a professional to get it just right.
Whether you are DIY-ing it or hiring a professional, consider these dos and don’ts below to get on the right track from the outset. Not only do you need to attract visitors, you need to retain them to visit more than just your home page and take your call to action.
Create a plan
Creating a website is a big and potentially complex project. Start by planning out what you need communicate and how you will accomplish it. Give some thought to the purpose of your site. Is it meant to attract visitors via SEO or serve as a virtual storefront for those already familiar with you? Will you sell items through the site? Do you intend for it to engage visitors with content? Make a sitemap and a wireframe—visual representations of a website’s format—to lay out the structure of the site and each page within it. All websites need the following pages: home, about us, services/products, blog, testimonials and contact us. You need a plan even if you are starting with a single landing page.
Consider about user experience and accessibility
What makes the difference between a good website and great one? Navigability. Your site needs to be easy to navigate and accessible to everyone regardless of their abilities. This is so important that there’s a whole field within website development called user experience (UX) design. Best practices include having a menu bar, using readable fonts, making basic elements like contact info and opening hours easy to find, avoiding busy or dark backgrounds, and making web content more accessible to people with a wide variety of disabilities.
Make it Mobile Accessible
With most Americans owning smartphones, a large portion of online browsing is taking place on mobile devices. A mobile-friendly site changes its layout and functionality when viewed on mobile devices, which is now essential to avoid losing out on potential traffic. Most website builders make it easy to see your site’s mobile version; toggle to that option to assess whether your users’ mobile experience will be the best it can be.
Optimize for SEO
If your goal is to attract visitors to your site through Web searches, you’ll need to consider search engine optimization (SEO). SEO research via tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can help you identify keywords that will help you rank in searches related to your business. Use those words in the site’s copy and in metadata and tags. In designing for SEO, you should also consider your site’s architecture.
Use images under 200KB
Very large images can slow down your site, annoying visitors or worse, making them click away. Use image editing tools to compress your pictures so they’ll work best for digital platforms. For your website, keep images under 200KB in size and keep the width of full-screen images to 2500 pixels or less.
Use original content
Using copyrighted content on your site without the express permission of the owner is illegal. Copyrighted content includes images that are not labeled as copyright-free and text on other sites. All of your content should be unique—simply changing a few words of someone else’s copy isn’t good enough. If you have other people writing content for you, run it through plagiarism-check programs to see if it’s too similar to other published content. For imagery, use your own photos, purchase stock photos or search out copyright-free images.
Plan for site maintenance
Once you’ve created your website, you’ll need to keep it up to date to ensure it stays relevant to your audience. This is a more time-consuming job for sites with lots of content, but it’s necessary to maintain your site no matter how evergreen it is. At the least, regularly go through your site to ensure that all links still work and refresh anything out-of-date.
It doesn’t have to be perfect
Following all the advice above will help you create a purpose-built, user-friendly, mobile-enabled site that will satisfy your visitors. But your highest priority should be getting your site completed and published. So, if some of the steps for perfecting your site are bogging you down, skip them, get the site finished and come back later to make improvements. Consider it a work in progress, just like your business.
Contributed by Marc L. Goldberg, Certified Mentor, SCORE Cape Cod & the Islands – Free and confidential mentoring – www.score.org/capecod, 508/775-4884. Source: ASK Score 2023.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: To succeed, give some thought to the purpose of your website
