How to Design the Best Website for Your Business

Running a business has always been a multi-faceted process, from connecting with your customers to ensuring that everything runs smoothly. And now, it is practically impossible to operate a business of any size without some kind of web presence. But that is where an effective website design comes in – especially as more and more consumers turn to researching the services and products they are interested in online before they buy.

A good website design ensures that your customers can easily find your business online and access the information they are looking for. And understanding how to design an effective website, whether you are doing it personally or if a Columbus web design company is taking on the task, can help you to create the best website design possible.

Below, we explore 3 tips on how to build an effective business website that will allow you to run your business smoothly.

3 Tips to Build an Effective Business Website

Ensure Your Website is Mobile Responsive

Mobile responsive web design is a critical element to keep in mind when designing a business website. In 2021 alone, mobile e-commerce sales brought in $3.56 trillion sales – showing a steady increase in mobile e-commerce over the last few years.

Mobile responsive websites ensure that users can access a functional website from any mobile device such as their smartphone, tablets and laptops. Just as ensuring that the desktop version of your website is user-friendly, your mobile site experience should be user-friendly as well.

If users come to your website on their phone and the text is hard to read or it’s difficult to navigate, they may just leave your site altogether. This can result in both lost sales and potential customers.

Good mobile website design often features some of the following:

• Simple page layouts such as one-column layouts and a lack of clutter on the page
• Readable text
• Optimized page speed
• Visuals and functionality that are consistent between the desktop and mobile sites

A web design company or individual website designer can use tools such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to test how mobile-friendly a webpage really is.

Optimize Your Content with Search Engine Optimization

The functionality of a business website is key, but the content that will make up the website itself is also important. You will want to include relevant and useful information for anyone that is visiting your website – such as information about your business, your story, details about your services or products, and content that answers questions your customers may have.

And this is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. SEO is the general practice of improving your site’s ranking in search engines like Google. Having a fully functional website that fits all ofyour needs will not be much help if no one is actually coming across your site.

Search engines have their own unique algorithms that work to rank websites through “crawling,”a discovery process where a team of crawlers search for updated and new content. The content they look at ranges from an entire webpage to videos that are featured on your website.

SEO can be used in a number of different ways, including:

• Creating high-quality content with focused keywords worked in that is relevant to your consumer base
• Optimizing your images and videos for search engines
• Using relevant keywords strategically throughout your site, including in your meta description, captions, header tags, title tags, and elsewhere

Optimizing your content with SEO will help your website become more discoverable as your consumer base searches for your products and services online.

Focus on Usability

Sometimes a simple design that emphasizes usability is the way to go for the most effective business website. According to a survey conducted by Statista in 2018, some 60% of those surveyed noted that website usability is very important for them when it comes to an online shop. This data shows that being able to navigate and use a business’ website easily can be a major deciding factor for consumers.

Usability can be affected by features such as colors, imagery, navigation, and overall website layout. For example, implementing good organization into a website can make all the difference to the user experience.

Users should be ableto access pages and information through a well-placed navigation menu – most often located at the top of your website. Consider that most users scan a site from top to bottom. A navigation menu at the top is the natural location for your users to look for one on your site.

The above tips to build an effective business website are just a small part of the overall process, but they help give you a better idea of how to approach building the best website possible.