9 Essential Tips to Create an Effective Business Website

Building a business and sustaining it for years is a rather different story from building an effective online presence for your brand.

One may think that creating a business website is all that there is about this whole digital trend, but the truth is, there are other factors that you need to consider before fully acknowledging that your efforts have been a success.

Building a website may be a breeze for those who have figured out which host to use, but for it to really work in your favor, you have to identify several other things first. It may range from defining your end goals to picking the right web host down to coming up with a comprehensive design for your website.

Here are nine of the essential tips that you should be looking at for your business website to fly exactly how you envision it to be:

1. Define Your Goals

What is your main reason for putting up a site? Do you have a goal in mind?

Well, of course, you do have a goal, but it has to be manifested on your site. This is one of the very first steps you have to complete before the actual building of the website.

You might find this one helpful, as this is the one holding your ideas together. Your goal is the glue that sticks everything so that you can come up with a solid plan for your website. It will become some sort of a guideline for you on how you should approach each part of the process.

This will help you identify what you need to be putting within your site to be able to achieve that goal. It can be as simple as wanting to strengthen your searchability online to being as deliberate as putting up an ecommerce feature to come up with more ways to generate income.

Whatever goal you have, it must be well integrated into the creation of your website.

2. Choose the Right CMS

Short for a content management system, a CMS is what you would be dealing with most of the time. Thus, you have to make sure that you choose the right one.

This serves as the backbone of your website. This is where you do all your backend processes to ensure that everything is coherent when you open the actual website.

And since this is what you will be dealing with most of the time, you have to make sure you can operate it with ease. This allows you to work on your website content even without specialized knowledge about technical language. This works without encoding any of the complicated codes website building are known for.

Popular CMS that you can choose from are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Blogger, and many others that can easily help you achieve what you want for your website.

3. Make Your Website Mobile Responsive

We’ve welcomed an era of mobile phone dependency, so making your website is mobile responsive is probably the wisest thing you could do.

There are data that supports how shoppers are fully trusting of the whole ecommerce trend, in which 79% of them made online purchases using their mobile phones. And even if they don’t purchase through their phone, they still use retail store websites to compare prices and read reviews.

This is exactly why you should never neglect the importance of making your website mobile-friendly. It has to be part of the planning process so that you won’t have to alter your visuals completely for it to cater to all mobile users.

4. Pick a Domain and Good Hosting Provider

A domain name is basically your identity online. This is how you can be identified by your customers and your potential clients.

It doesn’t have to be a complicated one. It could be as simple as your business name. Once you have it, you should share it with everyone on your list so that they’ll know where to go to when they need to know something about your business.

Now, it’s impossible to have a domain name without a hosting provider. Your host will be the one responsible for the creation of your website. It’s basically space where your website will be built.

Let’s put it this way: Web hosting is where your house is located. And because you have a house, it should have an address that comes with it— and that’s the purpose of your domain name.

It’s your online address, and people should know it so that they’ll know how to visit you anytime they want to.

Using Wix can be one of your options for web hosting. It’s social media compatible with a lot of templates to choose from, depending on the type of business you have. You’d feel like you have a professionally-made website once you’re done with all the process, when in fact, the host did all the job for you.

5. Keep Design Simple

The “less is more” principle is applicable when it comes to building your own website. By overcomplicating things, it has a tendency to scare visitors away.

Think of it this way: when you look for a place to eat and decide to visit a food park instead, you’d be overwhelmed by the choices you need to make.

Sure, it feels as if you’re in for a treat because you have a lot of options to choose from. But the thing is, this will only confuse you as to which will really satisfy your cravings.

In the end, you give in to pressure and pick the first thing that seems reasonable and then regret it towards the end of the experience.

Same with a website, if you try to put everything in one go, your visitors will likely be confused. Don’t try to do everything all at once. Focus on a few things that matter, and it will help you hit more numbers than when you overcrowd your site with unnecessary buttons and features.

While design and art are still subjective, the safest to go is to keep things simple and straightforward for every user. By doing so, you’re allowing them to fully digest the content of your site without unnecessary information, distracting them with what you have to say or promote.

If it doesn’t answer to your main goal, then don’t put it. It’s as simple as that.

6. Consider Website Load Times

Another benefit of keeping things simple is that it contributes to your website’s load time.

Although your web host would be a great contributor to this part, you have to consider the amount of graphics and other media you have carefully placed onto your site without compromising your site speed.

Regular check up on your site’s performance will help you identify how you can maintain your website’s load time to avoid any visitors abandoning your site.

7. Make it Easy to Navigate

A well-organized site is a site that’s easy to navigate. Think of it as if your customers don’t have all the time in the world to explore everything that your website has to offer.

Limit it to five essential tabs, and you’re good to go. Dan Veltri, who is the co-founder and chief product officer of Weebly, strongly encourages business websites to stick to that five tab rule.

That way, it’s easier to go back and forth to the different pages without dealing with a lot of unwanted interfaces before actually landing on the content you want to see.

8. Have a Call to Action

You have to use clear messaging if you want a good conversion rate. That’s what call to action is for.

If you want them to purchase something on your site, put a button that says “click here to buy” or something like “buy now.” It can be as simple as that. Remember that you’re trying to tap every possible digital citizen out there, so to speak the common language is a must.

Don’t overthink the messaging; as long as it is clear, you’d be glad you took the straightforward way and didn’t add any flowery words.

You should be able to transcend your message to everyone reading it— that’s one of the things you will need to measure your website’s success.

9. Add Contact Information

And like any other business transaction, you would also want to let your customers know that they can contact you anytime for concerns and suggestions.

Putting contact information on your websites, like a phone number or email address, will allow them to reach you for feedback that could improve your website or your overall service. It’s also one way of encouraging them to feel right at home with your presence.

Being reachable is a good business tactic. Remember that you have to get to know your consumers so that you’ll have supporting data when you wish to do extensive backend research about your business performance.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve learned these essential tips on how you can make sure that your website is not a waste of time, effort, and resources, we now urge you to follow through the execution of the whole thing.

Pair it up with a strong sense of digital mindset, and you’ll get the knack for it within a short amount of time. But even if you don’t seem to comprehend the whole thing, patience is what will help you get through the startup phase.