12 Design Tips for Building a Small Business Website

Designing a Website can be hard work, what skills do you need? can you do it yourself? should you do it yourself? When should you start to think about a website? After your company is up and running or is your business based on the web.

These are just a few questions you may be asking yourself and probably ones you should try get the answers to, by getting help from mentors or a web design company you should be able to come to the right answers.

Ive put a list together of things you should take in to consideration when planning, designing and building your website, the main aim being delivering content that visitors like but also being good to get ranked on search engine.

1. Design a logo, make sure you have a good logo. This is your brand and what you want people to remember you for. This will generally be at the top of your site, so its the first thing people see. A logo/brand can say a lot about you so this is important.

2. Text on each page needs to be relevant, a minimum of 250 words, having keywords about your product or service is good to have in there. Possibly look at having copy written by a professional that knows how to write for the web.

3. Images are important also, good quality shots of a product can say a thousand words, bad pictures can bring down the look of the site. But make sure you don't overload on pictures.

4. Each page should have its own page title, meta descriptions and meta keywords, a very important part in building your website.

5. Try use CSS (cascading style sheets), this works better for search engines and will also make for easier changes on the website, ie colour, font or font size.

6. H1-H6 tags should be used to highlight the main title on the page of where your text is, this usually relates to the page title, H2 tags would possibly follow as the titles of the following paragraphs. Bold text should be used to highlight keywords within the paragraphs also, but don't overdo this.

7. If you can use text navigation as this allows search engines to index your website better.

8. Make sure it's easy for an end user to buy your product or find the service, If its not easy to find what chance have you got to promote it. This all goes towards the conversion and bringing in the sales.

9. Links from your pages to other internal pages is also good, promote other products or services, making it easier for a user to find other things on your site. Again don't overdo this too much.

10. Build a site map, this makes it easier for search engines to index, you can upload an XML site map to Google webmaster tools which is beneficial in indexing all pages on your site.

11. If you are gathering any info from the website, ie through a form you should have a Privacy Policy.

12. Finally install Google Analytics, this is very important as the data that if gives your back about your visitors and where they come from is invaluable.

This is only a few points to think about, but it should give you a start when you are thinking about the design and build of your site. I would recommend that you consult with a web design company as they should be able to design and build a site exactly to your requirements and generally more professional in hitting the mark of your target audience.

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