7 Tips for Designing Business Websites for Beginners

According to one survey, about 51% of small businesses have a website up and running.

If you’ve thought about implementing a website into your company’s marketing plan, you may be wondering how you should design your website.

Part of growing your company’s reputation is allowing it to attract customers online. Here are tips for beginners on designing business websites.

1. Keep it Minimalist

When designing your website, you should make sure that you try and keep the design as minimalist and clean as possible.

If you cram too much information into one page or area at once, it will overload the viewer’s mind. That way they won’t be able to retain any of the information that’s on the page.

You have to make sure that you balance the graphics, text, and other multimedia on the page. You should also make sure that the design and colors work together well.

One way to keep everything simple is to stop using social widgets on your page, like a Twitter feed. If you’re giving the information people care about, you can always provide direct links to your social media.

You should also try and use consistent fonts and colors. Try not to use gifs and don’t put too many pictures and videos on one page.

Make sure that you break things up into short paragraphs and use bullet points when necessary to make it easier to read and more scannable.

2. Make Sure Google Can Find Your Site

There’s no point in creating a good website if no one can find it.

Most people use Google to do their searches, so you want to make sure Google can actually find your site and bring it up in search results.

If you want to make sure Google recognizes your site, you need to make sure your URLs work, you have a sitemap, you use relevant keywords, have good content, and an uncluttered site.

You should also include some basic search engine optimization (SEO) to make your results show up even higher on Google’s pages.

3. Make it Clear Who Your Business Is

If someone goes to your website to find out more information, you want to make sure that you make it clear exactly who your business is and what products or services you offer.

You don’t want them to feel confused about who you are, so make sure you have a clear brand name and mission beforehand.

In your navigation header and the footer of your website, you should make sure you have a link to an About Us page so that people can read more about your business.

If you need help refining your product, you can learn more here.

4. Create Good Content

This one may seem obvious, but you should make sure that you create good content for your website.

You should create a plan to publish articles on a regular basis. Come up with a schedule so that you make sure you can also be consistently pushing out articles and content.

To rank highly on Google searches, you need to make sure that people come to your site again and again. When you put out new content, people will have to go to your site to visit again, making Google think that you’re a very popular site and rank you higher in terms of searches.

While you are producing content, you should make sure that it’s on-brand and related to your product or service. Make sure that you also use an appropriate tone when you write.

5. Make Sure It’s Mobile Friendly

You should also make sure that your site is mobile friendly.

A lot of users now look at websites on their phones versus a laptop or PC. Because the screen sizes are different, you’ll need to make sure that your website works for both smaller and larger screens.

If it doesn’t work on mobile devices, you’ll end up cutting a lot of your audience out, and it makes you look unprofessional.

6. Make it Professional

This also goes without saying, but some businesses don’t understand how to make their website and content professional.

Some small businesses that don’t have the money may end up making their own website. However, to make it look and seem professional, you should hire someone to create your website if you can afford it.

If it’s good enough to bring in more revenue, think of it as a long term investment.

Having a professional design the website will also make sure that all the technical problems that could go with it will get ironed out and you can have someone fix it if necessary.

7. Easy to Find Contact Page

Lastly, you should make sure that you let people know just where to contact you.

This may seem obvious, but it’s so obvious that some companies accidentally overlook it.

You should have a contact page on the header and the footer. On that page, you should put your business’s phone number, address, and e-mail. You should make sure that it’s easy to find on the front page.

You may also want to put your hours for your business as well.