Every single business needs a website as much as it needs a chief or employees to keep going. Period. When it comes to building a website, there are five topics that you should work on if you want to build a great website for your customers. First of all, start by thinking of your website as a quite powerful window where you can get to know your customers better and they can get to know you better, too.
1. Content
If you don’t like what you see, you won’t buy it. It’s an old rule. If the content on your website doesn’t load fast, it will instantly become boring. It has to be short yet detailed and understandable so your customers can quickly find what they need. Also, It has to be straightforward to navigate. It has to look impressive but not ridiculous or pretentious. The images that you use must be excellent and have small sizes. You don’t want your customers to wait hours until a big picture is completely loaded.
2. Access
Your website can’t act like a misfit. You have to make it accessible from any kind of device. Most websites have their own mobile version, and those products always get much better profits. Ok. What if a customer wants to contact you? Your website is better than any social media. A customer will only contact you if there’s a phone number or an e-mail address in your website. Customers are people and they like to know that behind the screen there’s another real person, then they can trust you. Nowadays this is the first step to a long-lasting relationship between a small business and a customer. When you get a message from a customer, answer as fast and respectfully as you can. Please, don’t misunderstand me. I said above that your website is better than any social media, but it doesn’t mean that you should avoid using social media. Take advantage of it. Social media will make your business well-known, and if you’re smart and you link social media to the content in your website appropriately, it will also make the latter more up-to-date.
3. Search engines
Maybe you don’t know how helpful it can be to your business to use keywords in your website. Search engines like Google and Bing work with keywords, which they look for in your website and submit results about to your customers. For example, if your business is all about selling food, not only its website must avoid disgusting pictures, but it has to include many words related to food so that when customers search for the word “food” online, guess what they’ll find there: your website!
4. Broken links
Broken links? Oh my… They sound awful. And they are awful. I’m not talking about your main website address. It’s not broken (I hope so). What I mean is how terribly wrong it is to have broken links in your website. It looks exactly like a broken window in a boutique: it may have gorgeous clothes to sell, but no one wants to go in there. The first impression you get when you enter a website with broken links in it is that its owner is nuts. And it won’t help you at all. So you must be very careful about this. Your links can stop working without letting you know, that’s why you should use a link-checker or a HTML validator. You should also write useful, accurate links that take your customers where they really want to go to.
5. Appearance
On the other hand, don’t forget about colors. Colors are usually an underestimated, overlooked topic. The way you choose to present the colors in your website can make your customers visit it over and over again. It might seem difficult to achieve but you need to make sure that your website doesn’t only look good, but it looks beautiful. Yes, beautiful. Not only good or nice. Beautiful. As you already know, websites used to be slow some time ago, but not anymore. No one likes waiting in a bank queue, and that’s how it feels when a website loads slowly. The whole information in your website must load as fast as possible. That way it will be delightful for your customers to experience a beautiful and fast website. Surely they will keep looking for your product and they won’t ever think that your website is a boring bank queue.