9 TIPS FOR A GOOD BUSINESS WEBSITE

Are you a business owner looking to build a website? To someone new, the whole process can seem complicated, daunting and make you extremely confused. Don’t give up yet! As a 10-year experienced web developer, in this article, CO-WELL Asia is going to walk you through the 10 proven tips for a good business website. We will cover both technical, design, as well as content creation tips to weave in throughout the process.

Technical tips for a good business website

1. Quick Site load time:

According to a research by SOASTA, a website design company, showed that 88% of Americans surveyed said they had a negative feeling with brands that have unstable websites and applications, and 83% said sluggish websites caused them to have a negative reaction to a brand or business. In addition, 28% of respondents said they would go to a competitor’s website if the first website they visited takes too long to load.

Viewers can get impatient if a website takes too much time to load. Make sure that your business website design has the right server infrastructure and bandwidth to support it. A graphically intense design could eat into your loading time and put off prospective customers. Website load time can also be increased by picking up good hosts.

2. Own Your Domain

We also suggest that all businesses buy an actual domain name. Some providers offer free ones that come with extensions. However, “yourbusiness.com” , without a doubt,  more professional and easy to remember than “yourbusiness.wordpress.com”.

3. Pick a Reliable Host

There are also a wide range of different hosting platforms that are available. We recommend WordPress – a great scalable and customizable option. But there are others that you can look into based on your own website needs.

Design Tips for a good business website

4. Make your design unique

Whether you decide to design your website on your own or to outsource a website design company, your goal should be to create a website that reflects your brand.

The first impression is the most important and will either attract or repel viewers. If you use any run-of-the-mill template and your website look likes thousands of others on the Internet, you will never be able to impress your viewers. The homepage of any website is what will seal the deal for you so ensure that this becomes the anchor for your entire site and is impressive enough to grab the viewer’s eye.

Nothing can disappoint a visitor than a visibly ugly website design. Visitors always look forward to a smooth navigation process that can take them from Point A to Point B effortlessly without having to deal with visual or other obstacles. Also, clutter can a huge downer for your website and is sure to drive visitors away to your competitors. A simple, user-friendly, and tidy website design without any unnecessary frills and embellishments is the way to go.

5. Input the right images

Not all pictures are going to match your brand and the type of message you’re trying to convey to your audience.

Luckily, you’ve got a lot to choose from, even some that are for free. But still, cause caught many of us decide to plague our website with extremely stocky images.

Just because a stock website has the image,  it doesn’t mean it looks genuine and will evoke trust in your company. Ideally, you would love to use photos that portray images of the real people who work in your company and the office itself.

If real photographs are not an choice, there are techniques that you can use to help to choose the correct type of stock photo. This will aid in bringing more realism to your brand and making sure the visuals reflect who you are and what your content is trying to demonstrate.

6. Mobile optimization

Don’t forget about optimizing your site for mobile. If you don’t already know, 80% of internet users own a smartphone, and “Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead”.

It’s a necessity to tailor your site to fit the needs and wants of your visitors. You might want to ask yourself, why would someone access my site on mobile? What things would they look for? Does my experience currently allow them to do those things easily?

If your websites lagging on its mobile optimization, check out some of these awesome mobile websites to understand how they have created seamless mobile experiences for their users.

Content Tips for a good business website

7. Create relevant and useful content:

One of the most effective tips for a good business website is the relevance of content. This plays a major role in getting indexed by search engines. The more qualitative and quantitative your content, the easier it is for search engines to find and index your site. Poor or irrelevant content is also a game changer when it comes to attracting or putting off viewers. Headlines are where you need to pay extra attention as this will decide the difference between a visitor leaving your site or continuing further to browse the rest.

8. Contact details easily visible:

This may seem like the most obvious thing to do but small business website design companies tend to overlook this factor at times. Your phone number and e-mail address should be displayed prominently on the website and, if possible, at the top and bottom of every page. Create a ‘CONTACT’ page at the end which includes not just the contact numbers but email address, physical address of the company, and a map, along with directions to and hours of operation of your company.

9.  SEO focus

Last but not least, Search Engine Optimization is a must if you want to build a great website. SEO is a set of practices you apply to your website to ensure an index of search engines and properly rank your website and then show it to search engine users. If the website is “crawled” by search engines, it competes with websites that have identical content. The better your website design and content is, the higher your website will be ranked on search engine result pages.

Primarily, SEO consists the following practices:

• Optimal website code
• Research and implementation of keywords
• Fast speed of loading
• Being secure and having an SSL certificate installed (SSL is the standard security technology that guarantees data exchanged between web servers and browsers stay confidential)
• Having a mobile-friendly site
• Existence of high-quality backlinks (links on external websites with related content) that lead to your site
• Having lots of positive reviews online (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.)
• Using internal links throughout your site to keep people clicking and reading
• Using social media to link to your site (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.)

SEO is an extremely important ongoing process that can mean the difference between showing up on the first page of search engine results pages (resulting in large amounts of free traffic to your website) or page 300 (resulting in no traffic).

Conclusion

Through this article, CO-WELL Asia hopes you have gained more useful tips to design and develop your own business website. However, we know that building an e-commerce website is a complex process and requires a lot of technical understandings. Therefore, we recommend that you consult external resources. Here is a list of the Top eCommerce Development Companies that you should consider.

If you are looking for such a company in Vietnam, with over 10-year experience in consulting and developing websites for partners in Vietnam, Japan and English-speaking countries, in 2019, CO-WELL Asia has been ranked as TOP 1 website developer in Vietnam by Clutch.co. We are confident to give your business an impressive, professional website, creating a stronger mark in the competitive online market! Do not hesitate to CONTACT US if you have any questions about website design and development service.