How to Design a Business Website

An easy, attractive, well-designed, and interactive business website is crucial to your professional success. Your high quality business website can quickly draw user traffic, whereas a poorly managed and made site can quickly turn away your potential customers.

You need an interactive, user-friendly website to increase brand awareness and grow your business. Below, we have discussed how to design small business websites to maximise your ROI and develop your business.

What is Business Website Design?

Website design is the first look at the business’s online presence. It is the art of planning, conceptualising and arranging content so that they are shared and accessed online. 

The website designer works on appearance and layouts while at the same time, they work on the information being structured or categorised. Furthermore, they also work on first impressions, for instance the colours and images used.

Why is Website Design Important?

Website design is essential as it impacts the audience’s impressions of your brand. As there is a saying,” you never get a second chance to make the first impression”; your business website creates the first impression of your enterprise. 

According to a study, it takes 50 milliseconds to form the first impression. Furthermore, 75% of the users make and consider a company’s credibility based on the website’s visual appearance. Therefore, website design is critically important for a business to form the “first impression”. 

A high-quality small business website would usually involve:

• A good first impression 
• Creates a brand image and reputation
• Digital shopfront of your enterprise
• Creating a global picture of your business
• Aiding to rank your website on the search engine page 
• Credible, authentic, and approachable
• Significant in generating more leads and converting sales.

Purpose of Your Website

Before starting to build your site it is crucial to map out the goals and objectives of the website. Whether you want to sell your product on your site or inform the users about your business services, the purpose of your website should be crystal clear.  You first need to determine your website type, whether it’s an eCommerce or an informative website. 

Upon identifying the website type, the next step would be setting out the website’s purpose or strategy, whether your site would serve as an online store or another mixed website. Finally, it is essential to consider what your audience wants, experiences or understands when they visit your site.  

The next step before starting your website is to research trending websites related to your business. For example, if you are an eCommerce site, you may want to look at industry-leading websites like Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, and others.

Identify Website Type

There are numerous types of websites depending on your company’s needs and goals. For example, some websites may require extensive information about the products and services, while others may require information, extensive photography and many more. 

Here below, we have discussed some options, including:

• Blogs: Companies use informative blogs to inform about updates and industry trends. Blogs may offer a conversational tone and other features such as comment sections to engage the visitors.
• Business Site: These websites may provide information about your business, such as your services and values. These business sites usually include contact information, employee profiles, descriptions of services and many more.
• Online stores: This website usually sells products or services. This website includes product listings, payment options, shipping and return information, Wishlist features and many more. 
• Portfolios: Portfolio websites help display unique and professional design or creative work. The portfolio may showcase artwork, photographs, writing samples, or coding samples.
• Restaurants: Restaurant sites combine elements of online stores and business information. These websites usually include food menu items, including contact information, business hours and locations.

Research Trending Website

The web design industry is pretty dynamic, and researching the latest trends in web design can give an idea of what’s popular and effective with audiences. In addition, a website’s design changes quickly; thus, research on what’s trending before creating the site gives an edge. 

Choose CMS or HTML to Build the Website

Once you have set the purpose of your website, the next step would be to figure out how to create it. Most first-time site builders use CMS or Content Management System. CMSs are programs that help to create a website.  These are ideal for those who are not familiar with coding their website. With CSMs, one can design and publish the site content through text editors and wizards where the program does the coding.

Here are some of the most popular CMS sites, which includes:

WordPress 

WordPress is the most popular CMS in the current period that offers plenty of tools for both free and paid sites. Free plans include a variety of themes like compatibility with third-party services and the use of block technology. 

They can also integrate with the e-commerce site by providing analytics and mobile editing. In addition, the paid plans may include ad customisation or removal, custom domain name and collecting online payment.

Wix

Wix is another free CMS where the free version has minimal restrictions on features and templates. Their editor version is flexible and can access their app market. SEO customisation, 500 MB of web space, and no page limit.

Weebly

Weebly is another version of CMS where the free version comes with e-commerce, marketing, and customer support features. They also include 500MB of space, including no page limit and SEO for all pages. Paid plans allow for creating a custom domain name and ad removal option. 

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free eCommerce plugin for WordPress used for building WordPress websites. This CMS platform plugin helps SMEs build the store they want to sell online. This plugin is most popular across e-commerce platforms and continues to gain popularity due to its user-friendly interface and flexibility.

Shopify

Shopify is the perfect solution for any business looking to sell their products online. It offers a fully customizable platform with an easy-to-use checkout process and tons of features that will meet all your needs!

Planning Your Website Layout

A well-planned website design of site layout is crucial for branding your business image. In this section, you will plan how to organise the pages and paragraphs and the areas you must include. 

This section will help you choose the layout for your site navigation. A well-planned design will reduce bounce rates. You mustn’t skip this step of planning your site layout.

Registering Domain and Hosting

The next step before starting your business website design process is to set up your domain name and web hosting servers. Hosting refers to the physical service where your site will be stored, whereas your domain name is your site’s address, i.e. its URLs. 

There are a few domain registering services like Godaddy, GoogleDomain, CrazyDomain and many more. Therefore, it is wise to make sure that your domain name is short, easy to remember moreover clearly associated with your brand name.

Creating Quality Content

After planning your website’s layout and registering your domain name, it’s finally time to create your website. Be sure to keep your website organised as you have planned your layout.  

It is a well-known proverb that “Content is king”. Therefore, you must take the time to create all the content for your site. Any videos you want to use, images you want to make, and all the textual content like a blog post, service page, etc., should be as informative as possible and more beneficial to the users. 

Adding The Right Website Page

Adding the correct website page is another crucial element in des

igning the website for your business. Organise your content methodically so that it’s easy for the user to browse. Unorganised content doesn’t help the search engine comprehend your website’s content, hindering the bots and search engine crawl. Once created, you may consider adding pages like:

Home:

The website landing page is the first impression users get from your site. Include your company’s name, logo, and navigation menu for a better user experience.

About us:

About us is another crucial section for your site. This page should include your company’s information, name, values, history, mission statement, and branding. 

Products or services:  

This page is the most important page for your company. This page should describe what your products and services are. In addition, you should include images and videos to describe your services. 

Blog:

This page is helpful for companies who engage in content marketing. For example, you can customise your blog post to the needs of your audience, such as writing about new products and service information as well as valuable tips for the users.

Testimonials:

Testimonials are another important place where you can portray all your achievements and customer reviews for your small business websites. This page helps to build the credibility of your company. This section is more advantageous for service-based companies.

Frequently Asked Questions or FAQ:

FAQ is another helpful page for answering customers’ queries. You can answer all the questions so that the readers don’t have to contact customer support. 

Contact: 

The contact page is another crucial page for designing your website for your business. This page will help users to find your business’s contact details like email address, phone number, physical address and many more. In addition, this page should include social media links, live chat options or customer feedback.

Website Design Elements

Integrating your company’s branding into your website design is a critical element. The two most crucial website design factors are easy navigation and user experience. The aspects that aid these features include:

Architecture:

Web design architecture involves connecting pages logically, ensuring users find information quickly. 

Colour Combination:

Colour combination is indispensable for attractive website design. Your website’s colour or shade should be related to your company’s logo. Experts recommend using two shades of colour. The primary colour is recommended in the main content and the second for less critical content. 

Fronts:

Picking the right font for your business website design is crucial. Your fronts should be relatable for both desktops as well as mobile devices. You can use a maximum of 3 acts, i.e. one for headings, another for accents or emphasis and another for regular text.

Headers and footers:

The header and footer area of your website is essential for each page. For example, the logo and navigation pane should be at the top, whereas footers should include social media links and contact information at the bottom of each page.

Menus:

Menus are crucial for mobile sites. This element is also known as the universal navigator. People usually find essential information about your site from this section.

Motion Elements:

Any media elements like the GIFs and videos that move around the site are essential to attract traffic to your site. They are helpful for a more extraordinary user experience, although one should also be careful in adding motion elements as they may be distracting.

Scroll effects:

Scroll effects are another significant element that draws attention to certain areas of your website. This effect can deliver slick transitions between different layers of the same page.

Design Your Website Elements for Mobile Phones

In recent times more than half of web traffic is generated from a mobile phone, so designing a mobile-friendly website for your business is crucial for the tremendous success of your business. In addition, optimising for mobile platforms can help you reach more customers. 

A responsive website will offer layouts that can automatically convert from desktop to mobile formats. However, there are a few other things to consider while designing for mobile devices, such as resizing for image and mobile browsing, including vital information on the top of each page, moreover analysing how plugins and widgets appear on each mobile device.

Optimising Your Site for SEO

After you have built your website, It’s highly important to start search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is a marketing strategy that helps rank your website on the search engines. There are several tactics by which you can optimise your website, such as

• Local SEO 
• Image SEO 
• Mobile SEO
• Keyword research 
• Internal Linking 

Publish and Republish Your Website

When your website publishes and goes live, make sure to track user behaviour on your website. It would be best to look for pages with a higher traffic drive and check where there isn’t. Then, analysing your findings, you need to optimise your site performance for better growth. 

Helping You Build Your Business Website

As you have read how to design a website for your business, now is the right time to make one. Your business website will create local branding for your business enterprise and an international one. 

If you are unsure how to handle the details, you can get help from experts like us at Aus Asia Online. We have dedicated experience in building business websites that can suit your needs at an affordable cost. Moreover, we will help you optimise your website to boost traffic and generate more positive engagement. Our experts are always here to help you at a moment’s notice.