Tips for Building an Effective Business Website

10. Get personal.
Just as brick-and-mortar businesses invest heavily in their storefronts to represent their brand images, e-commerce retailers need to create high-quality online experiences in keeping with the brand perception, as Tom Lounibos, co-founder of SOASTA, told Business News Daily.

To that end, your About Us page should not be a dry block of text about your company. Emily Brackett, president of design and branding firm Visible Logic, recommends including a good photo of yourself or your team to personalize the experience for your customers.

9. Keep your design simple.
Limit the use of fonts, colors, and GIFs, which can distract and pull the eyes away from the focus of the webpage. Short paragraphs and bullet points also make the information more scannable and likely to be read. Ian Lurie, CEO of internet marketing company Portent Inc., suggests keeping paragraphs shorter than six lines.

This is especially important when it comes to mobile responsiveness, which is a major factor in how Google ranks websites in its algorithm. The better a website’s ranking, the higher it appears on the search engine results page (SERP). If a competitor is mobile-friendly and your website isn’t, you could get pushed down lower in your customers’ search results.

8. Have a call to action.
Each page on your website should entice the reader to do something. In other words, you need to give them a call to action. These landing pages should encourage users to take a certain action, such as to call your company, sign up for a service, buy a product, download a whitepaper, or do something else that benefits your business goals. Give them a noticeable invitation to take the action: a button, a link, or clear verbiage. Keep it above the fold if possible so that readers do not have to scroll before finding the call to action.

7. Respect the need for speed.
A study by digital marketing company Akamai found that 88.5% of web users will leave a website if it loads too slowly. Furthermore, the time it takes to load a webpage affects the purchase decisions of nearly 70% of online shoppers.

Make sure your website runs smoothly by keeping the software up to date, optimizing videos and images for quicker downloads, and using a website host that can handle your bandwidth demands.

6. Make sure it’s accurate.
It should go without saying that inaccurate information will turn off consumers, whether it’s a wrong number, outdated product information or simple grammatical errors. You should not only proofread each page before it goes live, but also periodically check each page, especially after making updates anywhere else.

5. Keep your pages uncluttered.
Paul Bolls, associate professor of strategic communication at the Missouri School of Journalism, said that readers need to be able to put information in context. If a site has too much information, it overloads the mind, making it unable to retain the new information. Be sure to use a good balance of text and graphics that presents a clean page.

4. Make it easy to navigate.
Dan Veltri, co-founder and chief product officer of Weebly, advises limiting your top-level navigation menu to five clearly labeled tabs, with related pages organized under them. You should also offer a clear way to get back to the homepage no matter where your readers land. Very often, a Google search may take your reader to a page on your website other than the homepage.

3. Place your contact information above the fold.
If your business depends on people being able to contact you or call your sales team, put that information where they can find it easily.

“Your contact information should be visible, preferably at the top of the homepage, so that visitors don’t have to search for a phone number or address if they want to contact the business,” said David Brown, CEO of Web.com.

2. Make it easy to find.
You need a domain name that either matches your company name or describes your business in some way. You can even have multiple domains that point to the website. This means incorporating technical SEO best practices, keyword research, content marketing and paid advertisement campaigns to drive traffic to your website.

1. Make your site mobile responsive.
Mobile responsiveness is critical for a website to be effective. American adults spend more than five hours on their mobile phones every day, while more than one-third do all of their shopping online via mobile device. Needless to say, your business’s mobile website must offer a positive user experience.

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