Professional Website Tips for Small Businesses

If you were to go to a professional for this project, they would start out by having you tell them about your business. Why? By understanding what your company provides, they will begin to understand what your customers will be looking for. By looking at your company from a customer’s perspective, you will begin to comprehend what elements your audience will require of your site.

By understanding what your clients will expect when they arrive at your site, you will be able to assess whether you need a simple HTML site, integrated dynamic, or ecommerce capabilities. Once you understand the actual needs of your clients you can seek out the resources to include the necessary technologies in your site.

While a site full of fancy graphics may seem impressive, it is actually impractical. Your graphics should serve a purpose. A logo and a feature picture of your work, owner, or other identifying object would be acceptable for the home page. If you provide a variety of products and have pictures of each, these should be saved for a product or catalog page. Customers expect to wait for a catalog to load, but not a home page.

It is also important to make your site easy to find and read, and navigation should be simple and quick. People are so busy today that they will not wait for a site’s home page to load. They will simply move onto the next result in the search engine rankings.

While it may seem like Windows Internet Explorer is the standard for web surfing, you must be certain that your site is also compatible with different versions of Internet Explorer, as well as more recent competitors like Firefox, and Google’s Chrome. They display sites differently and different countries favour different browsers. You do not want to eliminate customers simply because they use a different browser than you do.

It is also necessary to see how your site will appear under different screen resolutions. With the variety of screen sizes being used today, people are using a wider variety of screen resolutions. You must be cautious to avoid options or links being unavailable to users that employ lower screen resolutions.

In practice, the initial creation of the website requires less time than testing and tweaking. The testing of your newly created sites in multiple browsers using multiple screen resolutions can be tedious. However, it is a vital part of giving your site a professional appearance. Even once it is published on the internet, be sure to test every button and every feature to ensure that it functions as you expect. It is particularly important that any ecommerce features perform as anticipated. People will lose trust in you and your company if their money is not handled with the care it should be. So don’t skimp on the testing phase of your website creation – it can be very costly in terms of your reputation.