Having a well-performing website requires much more than basic aesthetics. Small Business website design must ensure the site is an effective sales tool and therefore, must be designed for sales effectiveness. There are certain things that high converting websites do differently than sites that fail to deliver. Below, we will be going over why you should have a professional handle your design instead of opting for basic website builders.
Creating an Effective Small Business Website Design:
1. Aesthetics Alone Won’t Be Enough
One of the main things these websites do is utilise functional design instead of relying solely on aesthetics. Don’t simply place your navigational bar and other web elements where you think they look good. It is best to position it to enhance the user’s experience for guidance towards the aspects of your website that convert. Therefore, you should be placing your Call-To-Action above the fold and virtually everywhere accessible for visitors to your site.
The KPMG report “The Truth About Online Consumers” reinforces the critical nature of websites in the purchase journey. In the report, they state: “During the consideration stage, the importance of online channels continues to prevail, with the top two channels for research being online reviews (cited by 55% of respondents) and company websites (47%)”. At each stage of the purchase journey, the online presence is important and as such having a professional, and sales optimised, small business website design is a necessity.
2. Create A Compelling Call-To-Action
Small business owners need to have a Call-To-Action on their website, but it should be compelling, and you should be testing it. It’s not enough to throw a Call-To-Action on your website and leave it there. Around 70% of small business websites do not have a Call-To-Action at all so any inclusion will be good but why limit yourself to just “good”? Small business website design must ensure there is a Call-To-Action that creates the right conversions for your business.
Achieving the right conversion rate may require testing to determine the winning style and placement. It is best to craft the Call-To-Action, place it, and optimise it through split-testing and driving traffic to it. Split-testing will allow you, or your website developer, to identify which placement delivers the highest conversions.
3. Responsive Design
Your small business website design previously only needed to look good on desktops and laptops. After all, that is what people generally used to look at sites and do their browsing. Nowadays, that couldn’t be further from the truth. More than ever before, people are using their favourite mobile devices to do their browsing. The volume of searches done on phones and tablets has led to a shift in design thinking.
You now have to focus more on your mobile users and prioritise them over your desktop and laptop audience. After all, the majority of users are likely to be browsing your website on mobile devices with smaller screens. Therefore, you want to be certain they have a good experience by providing them with a scalable website solution that is mobile responsive. Not only is it for their user experience, but you also need to have a responsive website that will be able to rank well within the search engines.
Google and other providers understand the overwhelming majority of people who use their search engines are not using them on mobile devices. Therefore, they prioritise mobile websites as a ranking factor.
Summary
Overall, there is a lot that needs to be done to get your website ranking higher in search pages. Your design plays an integral role in determining how well your website will be able to succeed. By utilising some of the tips above, you should be able to do just that. These are things that you can only achieve with a custom design.
A simple web builder may help you create a website from scratch that looks good, but that doesn’t deliver what you need to convert site visitors to potential customers effectively. You need a fully optimised website to convert traffic into actual leads and sales for your business.
Budgets are often tight for small business owners but with 61% of internet users doing research online before buying it is one of the most critical aspects of sales opportunity. Achieving greater success is worth investing in up-front. That is something you will only be able to get from a professional who handles small business website design in Brisbane.
