Site-Building Tools

Not everyone has the skills needed to put together a great business website — but if you’re one of those beginners, don’t despair. There are more tools available for site building than ever before, and the majority of them are geared towards those with little or no experience. 

Many of them have manageable price points, as well.

  • WordPress is also a frequent contender, with its highly adaptable platform and hundreds of plugins that can be used as needed. Pearl White can customize or design a template from you at an affordable rate.
  • If you want to build a great ecommerce site, we can incorporate WordPress WooCommerce into your site at an affordable price.

Main Elements Of A Great Business Website

An important factor that plays into launching a great site is education: you must learn about what elements your site needs and how they can best be leveraged.

Simple sites are often the most effective, which is great for beginners. Think of your site design as a target: the main purpose of your site, conversion, is at the center, and the concentric rings around that target are the individual elements that drive the consumer closer and closer to that goal.

To create and maintain a successful business site, you should include the following.

  • A well-strategized homepage. Your homepage is the first thing that a visitor sees, so it needs to make a deep impression. 
  • Focus on user experience. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What do they want from your site, and how can you make sure they get it? Make your site easy to navigate, easy to search, and make sure that important information is easy to find.
  • Visual appeal. We tend to judge books by their covers, and often judge websites by what they look like. 
  • Well-written content that includes calls to action.

These are just some of the most basic elements that must be included in your site in order to make it effective. The more you learn as you run and maintain your site, the more you may want to include further down the line. For an effective launch, though, don’t forget these points.

 

Effectively Branding Your Site

Your website is the home of your business. Just like your own home reflects you and your family, your site should also be easily identified as belonging to your business. That’s where branding comes in.

You may not think that this matters too much for a small local business, for instance. But a well-branded site does more to direct customers to the company than a generic site would, because it uses every opportunity to build the brand personality. This creates more involvement and engagement on the part of the customer.

Take a local small business like a photography studio, for instance. In building the perfect site for the photo studio, you wouldn’t just use default imagery and colors. You would focus on the personality behind that business, and let that personality be expressed in the visual decisions you made in designing the site. 

You might choose warm colors, images of the couples or nature that the studio takes, and you’d certainly need to get photographer’s studio logo for branding. Branding the site appropriately reinforces the reputation of the company and helps it to stand out from its competition.

A well-branded website means using your branding style guide, which should outline decisions on:

  • Typography
  • Color palettes
  • Type of imagery
  • Logo
  • Overall content style

Branding is all about communicating with your customer, so make sure to include a focus on customer service and outreach within your site design.

 

Launching Your Site With Marketing And Social Media

Once your site has been created and is ready to launch, you’ve reached a vital step in making it available to the public: making sure that everyone knows about it!

Unfortunately, just like the website itself, marketing for small businesses can cost a lot — some estimates suggest at least $1000 monthly, going up to as much as $20,000, the more complex your marketing strategies get.

But again, just like with the website itself, it is very possible to keep your marketing output well under budget!

One of the top sources that consumers use for information about any given brand is social media. Social media, luckily, is free — so what you’ll need to invest is your time and effort, rather than your budget.

Marketing experts suggest that you market across a variety of platforms in order to reach the widest possible audience. You can reach the greatest number of potential customers if you start and maintain social media profiles for your brand on:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Snapchat

There are other social media platforms out there, and more are created every year. You never know which ones will take off and become the new social media hit, so it’s wise to keep an eye on what’s trending.

But for your launch, it’s suggested that you already have these social media platforms in place before you unleash the site. This gives you time to build up a following, spread the word, and interact with potential customers, in order to have the biggest impact when you do announce the site launch.

On-Budget, On-Message — Your Ideal Website

Basically, a good business website needs two things:

  • Excellent design and content
  • An audience

How you create and launch your site will provide you the bridge between those two factors. An expert might tell you that it’s best to pay someone else to do it for you, but that often is beyond the means of a small business owner. Rest assured that launching a fabulous site is within your reach — without breaking the bank.

Author Biography 

Betty Shane works as a professional blogger for multiple websites. Her work as a freelance content writers allows her to explore diverse topics including but not limited to digital marketing, business and design.