Tips for Designing a Successful Small Business Website

If a business wants to compete in the modern marketplace, it needs to have a website. The internet is where the modern consumer goes to find and learn about local businesses. If you do not have a website, you are not going to be able to reach as many customers as you could, and it is going to be difficult to keep up with your competitors.

Finding a Toronto website design company is one of the steps toward building a successful website, but there are several points that need to be considered. When a business owner understands the elements that go into building a successful website, they can make better decisions concerning website design. In addition to that, this knowledge can help to make it easier to collaborate with the website company you hire.

Define your goals

It’s not enough to know that you need a website. Obviously, your business needs an online presence. But what are you trying to achieve with your website? Different websites have different goals. If you want to have a successful website design, you need to identify your goals. Common goals include selling products and services, getting people to sign-up for a list, educating consumers and providing people with a means to contact your company. Once you know your goals, you and your web design firm can start planning a website that will reach those goals.

Keep it simple

One of the keys to good website design is to make it easy for visitors to achieve the goals that they have with the website. If your design is overly complicated, cluttered or confusing, visitors will have a hard time figuring out what they need to do to move closer to their goal. A good small business website will have a simple design that is not filled with a ton of unnecessary information or elements that do not serve the purpose of achieving the possible goals that visitors may have.

Use calls to action

Removing potential barriers is one way to make sure visitors can achieve their goals, but you can also tell people what you want them to do. Even with the best design principles, some customers may still have a hard time figuring out what they should do. If you have a call to action, it ensures that every customer knows what they should to do to move closer to the intended purpose of the page. When you are working with your website design company, you want to define goals for the website, but you also want to define goals for specific pages. Once you know the goals of the different pages, you can develop CTAs that will work well on each page.

Showcase products and services

If you are selling products and services online, you want to make sure visitors can find information about your products and services. Work with your Toronto webs design agency to develop pages for all of your products. You may even want to develop informational pages to help people learn about your products and services. On these pages, you can explain the product or service being showcased, cover the features and express the value that comes with purchasing the product or service.

Optimize for search engines

Website traffic is not something that just happens. You need to have a strategy for attracting traffic, and a focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a good place to start. Any competent web design firm in Canada should be able to help you optimize your site for organic search traffic, but there is value in understanding some of the best practices.

Have a content strategy

You are going to need to work with your website design company to develop the content that is going to go on your website. Your Toronto web agency may offer services for things like images and text, but you may also need to do some of the content development on your own.  Beyond working on the content that is going to populate the site when it first goes up, you also need to consider whether you are going to have an ongoing content marketing strategy.

Mobile-friendly design

Mobile is increasingly becoming the preferred portal through which consumers access the internet. If your site is not designed with mobile in mind, it will not look good or deliver a good user experience for visitors that access the site on mobile devices. As an additional point, it will also help with your SEO efforts. When people use Google on their mobile device, the search engine prioritizes pages that have a responsive or mobile-friendly design.

Contact Information

You obviously want to make it easy for potential customers to contact you. Creating a ‘Contact Us’ page is obviously a part of this strategy, but too many businesses leave it at that. If being able to contact your company is an important part of the website strategy, you should include contact information at the bottom of every page and include contact information in a high visibility location on the home page. Furthermore, you want to make sure to include all of the important contact info: phone numbers, email addresses, physical address and more. In the modern day, you may also want to include links for visitors to connect with your business on social media.

As a final tip, when you are looking for a web agency in Toronto, you want to make sure you are going with a company that can meet the needs of your business. Talk to them about your needs and ask them about the web design services that they offer. You may also want to ask them for some references and review some of the work they have done for previous clients.