Your website serves as a central hub for your business, and as such, it should be designed, built, and operated with your long-term growth strategies in mind. This is important to consider in every aspect of the web design process. MyWebTips provides access to resources that can help you navigate the process from start to finish.
Essential Design Elements
The best websites are engaging, well-designed, responsive, and easy-to-use interfaces. To be effective and grow with your company, your website development should be created with your business and marketing plans in mind. In particular, it’s important to integrate your customer relationship management (CRM) tool with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Your CRM is a system for storing data and information related to prospects and customers. Your ERP is essentially a process for using a single system to consolidate and integrate key business functions. This can include things like purchasing, marketing, financial tracking, and human resources. A skilled website designer can develop an operating platform that essentially allows your website to work on numerous comprehensive levels.
Customer-Friendly Features
We’ve all found ourselves navigating websites that feel like endless mazes that continually redirect us everywhere but where we want to go. According to Business News Daily, this is not only frustrating for users, but it can also hurt a business when prospects give up and leave. Websites that are thoughtfully designed in an intuitive fashion make it easy to do business with you. Are there certain online retailers or service providers you regularly frequent simply because of the ease of doing business with them? Are there other service providers you avoid because it’s just too frustrating? Before you meet with a website developer, do some research and provide examples of sites and features you want to emulate.
Start Small or Go Big?
Small businesses and startups often know a website presence is essential, but are on a tight budget. While this is a necessity you don’t want to skimp on, a skilled web developer can design a site that has the capacity to expand as your business grows. Ask about build features that need to be created during initial wireframe development and those that can be expanded or built on later in your company’s lifecycle. This allows you to lay the foundation for a robust and comprehensive site without necessarily having to build out pages and features you aren’t yet ready to use. For example, you might not have a blog or an online catalog, but you can have the site designed to accommodate those things in the future. Your designer can help you evaluate what you need now, and what can be updated or refreshed at a later date.
Consider Content Needs
Your site content should be developed with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. SEO terms are words that rank high in online searches and help drive traffic to your site. Zenbusiness.com shares effective and creative ways to work SEO verbiage into your website copy so they are effective but don’t appear to stand out in an unnatural way. If you utilize an analytics tracking program, you can keep an eye on the highest-ranking SEO words for your business or industry and incorporate them as appropriate. If you don’t know which keywords are best to use, utilize the Google keyword tool planner tool as a resource.
According to Smashing Magazine, once you have the basics of your website design, you’ll want an impartial third party to go through the site and attempt to do different things to test out the user experience. The key features of your site should be easy to search, access, and use. It’s like proofreading – after you’ve reviewed it numerous times, it’s easy to overlook things like jargon that might not make sense, or instructions that aren’t clear. Your ultimate goal is to make your site as safe, secure, and easy to use as possible.
My Web Tips provides a wealth of resources on how to make your website your most effective business tool. Visit the site today or reach out via email for additional information.