30May 18 13 Pro Tips to Create A Business Website in 2018 (Infographic)

In this article, I am going to give you the pro tips to create a business website as creating a website with a killer design is simply not enough. You should treat it as an art.

I might sound obvious as I simply can’t form a new cliché but…

…a functional website with a professional design and look that reflects your business ethos is simply your BEST sales tool and similarly, a bad looking website is detrimental to your business reputation and sales.

That’s it!

Now:

Before I start giving you the tips to create a business website, it is important to note that:

A website is not only for entrepreneurs, small businesses or big MNCs. They are as much for home-based businesses as they are for anybody who is trying to sell a product or a service.

If you take the following 13 tips to create a business website into account, be assured that if not light years ahead, you will at least be miles ahead of the competition.

#1 Define the Purpose of Your Website

The first step in creating your business website is to decide what your website is going to do for you.

And since it’s about ‘Purpose’, it is entirely dependent on you. Even if you hire a professional.

Your website may be either static, which means no new content is added periodically and it is simply there to provide more information to your potential clients about your services or products.  In that case, visitors will come to just check-you-out online.

Or

You may want your website to be dynamic; i.e. you use your website for information about your company, your background and provide informative articles/blogs to your clients and potential customers.

And of course, you can use your business website to sell products and services online and serve the purpose of an e-commerce website.

Knowing what you plan on doing with your website is absolutely critical as it’s the only thing that will guide you on how to develop your business website going forward.

An important thing to note is:

Your business website is not a static thing. So, even if you start off without online sales, you can definitely add the e-commerce feature at a later stage.

#2 Choose Your Web Content Management Software (CMS) Sensibly

Whether you create an e-commerce website or a business website,

Remember,

All the information on your website is stored on your hosting server. Whenever you want, you can edit those files and make necessary changes to your website.

However, that’s kind of a pain every time you wish to do it!

This is where the use of CMS is so helpful in that it lets you edit and make changes to your website from the domain itself.

All you need to do is log in to the domain.

Then you can easily edit the layout, customize your settings and content or create new pages and posts. Do as you wish!

The bottom line is:

A CMS makes creating and updating your website much easier, saving you a ton of time and pain.

There are plenty of options that you can choose from when it comes to CMS.

There is WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Rainmaker and many more. Go to the Internet, do your research and then choose a CMS which fits your needs and gives you convenience.

#3 Deciding on Templates & Plugins

In order to make your business website look professional, you need to add some features to it.

First comes the template.

With Joomla or WordPress, there are not hundreds but thousands of templates to choose from. Some templates are fairly generic while some are designed specifically to suit a particular type of product or service.

For example, if you are a real estate agent, you will choose a template that is geared towards selling real estate. This template will have a relevant background and will come with features that will enable you to showcase your listings.

If you are a career consultant or a dog groomer, choose a template that meets your exact requirement.

Even though there are plenty of free templates, you should consider spending a few bucks and buying a premium template that not only will match your needs but also, will give you the look and feel that you desire.

After you have finalized your template, it’s time you add some additional functionality to your website that will make it easy for visitors to come and stay.

Like templates, there are many free plugins out there but by paying a few bucks, you can get much better and fully customizable plugins.

Whether it’s e-commerce features, social media sharing buttons, videos, podcasts, free material downloads, photograph portfolio, surveys, polls or newsletters—you name it and a plugin is there for you.

#4 The Design Should be Simple & Your Website Should Look Organized

Once you are done choosing your template and plugins, it’s time to think about the design of your website.

Start by thinking how you want your website to look and how will it be used.

The design of your website includes logos and other visuals, the menu selections that you want to make available and the kind of information you want to put on the pages of your website.

The starting point is certainly the Menu.

There’s always a home selection but you always have the choice to decide on what the main menu selections are and what sub-menus of each of those main menu selections will be.

This is a critical step in creating your business website and therefore, you need to think carefully about how you want to organize and structure the information on it, in a way that will give you the maximum flexibility.

What I would recommend is:

Even if you decide on three main menu selections initially, always leave scope for future additions so that your initial design can accommodate them easily without any hodgepodge.

#5 Use Original Content

Since you are thinking of creating a professional website, you need to consider this as a vital part of your content marketing strategy.

Whether it’s your products and services page, about us page or blog posts, your content should and must not be taken from any other website.

If you use plagiarized content, you lose your credibility and reputation.

As simple as that!

One more thing is that when you copy content from other websites, you can forget about SEO and a competitive rank on Search engines.

Therefore, high-quality content is a must for your website.

Leave alone the killer design and the professional look; if your content is copied, you better go back to the old days of printing business cards as you will never have a credible online reputation.

Whatever you write for your website, do not stress yourself and choose a vocabulary and tone that will be understood not only by your loyal customers but also by random visitors.

#6 Make your Website Mobile-responsive & Quick Loading Time is a Necessity

When it comes to that one tip on the technical side of building a website, the first thing that you need to ensure is that your website is mobile-responsive.

This is because, for many years now, mobile viewership is surpassing desktop viewing by a significant margin and this trend is expected to rise exponentially as we move on.

Be it mobile or desktop, a user is assessing the same content through different platforms; however, as mobile devices are much smaller, they usually have limited access to fast internet.

Your website has to fit the small screen of mobile devices and load on it as quickly as on the desktops or else the audience will have a negative reaction and they are not going to stay for a long period of time on your site.

If images and videos take a longer time to load on mobile devices, people will lose their interest and will stop engaging with the website.

It is paramount that you avoid designing web pages only for large monitor screens and using complex features like Flash Animation videos or navigation.

Keep the design and layout as simple as possible so that your website is optimal for any device a user might be using.

Make sure all the software used on your website are updated, videos and images are optimized for quicker downloads and use a website host that can handle your bandwidth demands.

#7 A Picture is Worth More than a Thousand Words
This is a property of a great website. And by great, I mean a website that generates more and more leads.

A website that uses both content and media in forms of picture and videos to tell the business’s story, is the kind of website I am talking about.

A lot of small businesses get the content aspect right for their website but miss out on the media part, which is just as important.

There are some typical cases where a picture can sell your service much better than anything you write.

For example,

If you run a restaurant website, pictures of food items are your best options as those pictures will make a visitor crave for the portrayed foods. This is similar for a clothing e-commerce website as well.

You might think that this tip for developing a business website is specifically suited for e-commerce websites but think about the website of a law firm. Having headshots of all your employees will create trust among the visitors.

The bottom line is:

Visuals always help you sell your product and when it comes to a consumer making a purchasing decision, the picture you put on your website could be the reason why he or she chooses your business over a competitor’s.

#8 Keep the Pages of Your Website Uncluttered

This is a tip to make your website look professional.

The pages of your website need to be uncluttered as your primary requirement is helping a visitor or reader put the information present on the website in context.

If your website has too much information in it, it overburdens the mind of the reader and it becomes really hard for the individual to register all the information.

For not overwhelming the readers with chunks of information, you need to strike the right balance between the text and graphics, presenting a clean page in front of the readers.

One simple way to do it is by cutting off the social widgets such as Twitter feeds on your website.

Just ask yourself this thing:

Would a random visitor care about the information you have put on your webpage? And by ‘care’, I don’t mean whether the information is helpful, informative or relevant. Simply whether a reader would find it interesting.

That’s all you need to worry about.

If a widget content does not support the purpose of a web page, simply remove it no matter how much you like it.

#9 Create Strong & Visible Call-To-Actions

This tip for developing your business website would open up to you a new aspect of understanding the right functionality of a website.

Your website is basically a salesman whose job is to generate leads or customers for your business. And utilizing this aspect of a website is absolutely critical when all you want is more customers.

The only way you can do this is by having a strong and visible call to action (CTA) button on your website.

The best CTAs are those that give potential users a reason to take the next step and buy what you sell.

Let me give you a few examples of incentive-based CTAs:

• “For Free Consultation, Contact Us Today”
• “New Customers Receive Instant 10 Percent Off on their first Purchase”
• “Contact us today to Claim Your $100 Off”

Now, what if you haven’t planned for having an incentive-based CTA?

You can make your CTA as clearly visible as possible and lead a visitor through it to some medium via which the lead can contact you. Here, I don’t mean a social media platform but a contact form or an email address field.

To make your CTA extremely visible, you can either put it in the Menu bar, or at the centre of the page when it’s loading or even in the floating bar. Studies have shown all of them are great placement options.

#10 Build a Website for Your Customers

Whatever tips that I have given you so far, make sure to keep this tip in mind.

It is obviously important that your business website speaks volumes, explaining the value that it brings to the life of your customers but the manner in which you do it is critical.

You do not want to just put up a sales pitch out there, but you need to present the information and promote your business as a solution to your customers and potential clients. You need to execute this in a way that they understand the real value of your business in their lives.

You can definitely inject your personality and your personal taste into your website but again, this should be done in a way that resonates with your ideal customers.

Remember:

The main priority of your business website lies in satisfying, engaging and retaining visitors, showing them the benefit that they can get from your business.

#11 Your Website Should be Treated as an Experience

One thing to know when you are creating your business website is that it isn’t just a sales brochure that tells interesting prospects of your business.

Instead, paying a visit to your online address should be an experience for people, every time they visit your website.

It should be a rich experience from which they can make observations and collect information, which in turn, will guide them to their future decisions related to your business.

This tip for building a professional website is of utmost importance as your goal is not just providing information to people but also making them believe in your offered solutions in an easy, satisfying and hassle-free way.

#12 Make Your Website an Easy Place for Visitors to Engage

Making your website easy to navigate has a lot of advantages.

If a visitor can move seamlessly through your website, he or she will be able to take in all the information smoothly and you will be able to give them a comfort zone, which they will not find on any of your competitors’ websites.

Whether a visitor is on your website to just get your contact information, sign up to your email list, download a free e-book or make a purchase, make it as hassle-free as possible for the visitor to perform that action.

The more you make it easy for people to engage with your website, the more easily you can turn your online address into a lead-generating machine for your business.

#13 Consider Quality over Quantity

This might be the last tip in this article, but it is equally important.

When you are designing and developing your business website, don’t bite off more than what you can actually chew.

Most of the time, especially small business owners, list feature after feature, widgets after widget, page after page for that they want to build. But in reality, they don’t have the budget to fulfil that order!

My simple point is:

When you are building your business website, quality always trumps quantity. It is much better that you start off with a small budget and a high-quality website, than get burned out building a giant site.

The benefit of “small-budget high quality websites” is that you save your money, time and effort on building lavish features and can concentrate on giving your visitors the best experience.

If your website doesn’t have that aesthetic appeal, do not worry a bit! Simply do the following three things and your customers will be happy, leave with a smile on their face:

• Make sure your website loads under three seconds
• Make your website mobile responsive
• Creating an informative customer experience and helpful customer assistance

That’s it!

Wrapping Up

Your website is your business’s online establishment.

Therefore, there is no point in taking a feature-loaded physically-messy storefront approach. You simply don’t need it.

You want your customers to find what they need without any difficulty, give them information that is valid and something they can trust, and your job is done.

Fancy is not what you should look for, but simplicity is what you must chase.

Remember these 13 pro tips to create your business website and you’ll have an online address that will not only look great but also, will bring in more customers and eventually more money to your enterprise.