Even for brick-and-mortar stores that do not do e-commerce, having a web presence is important later. With the various website design tools accessible, creating an internet site is not difficult. Keep these design concepts in mind no matter which program you use.

1. Make your site mobile responsive: For a website to be effective, it must be mobile responsive. Every day, Americans spend more than five hours on their phones, and more than a third of them conduct all of their shopping online using a mobile device. Your company’s mobile website, of course, must provide a great user experience. If potential clients reach your site on a mobile device and find it difficult to read or navigate, they’ll just abandon you in favor of competition. Furthermore, a poor mobile user experience has an impact on your website’s search engine rankings, making it more difficult for users to locate through a Google search – which leads us to our following issue.
2. Make it easy to find: You’ll need a domain name that either fits the name of your organization or describes it in some way. It’s even possible to have many domains pointing to the same website. To generate visitors to your website, you’ll need to use technical SEO best practices, keyword research, content marketing, and paid advertising campaigns.
3. Place your contact information above the fold: If your firm relies on customers being able to contact you or your sales staff, make sure that information is easily accessible. Your contact information should be accessible, preferably at the top of the homepage, so that visitors don’t have to look for a phone number or address if they want to contact the firm. If you utilize social media to communicate with customers, include links to your social media accounts in the website’s header or footer.
4. Make it easy to navigate: Keep your top-level navigation menu to five properly defined tabs with relevant pages organized beneath them. No matter where your viewers land, you should provide a clear path back to the homepage. A Google search will almost always direct your reader to a page on your website other than the homepage.
5. Keep your pages uncluttered: Readers must be able to place material in its proper perspective. When a website contains too much information, the mind becomes overburdened and unable to retain fresh knowledge. Make sure there’s a decent balance of text and graphics on the page to keep it looking tidy. One method to keep things simple is to remove social widgets from your site, such as a Twitter feed. Consider whether you’re including material that your reader is interested in. Remove any widget material that does not support the page’s goal.
6. Make sure it’s accurate: Consumers will be turned off by erroneous information, whether it’s a wrong phone number, obsolete product information, or basic grammatical errors. You should not only review each page before publishing it but also check it regularly, especially after making changes elsewhere.
7. Respect the need for speed: According to research, 88.5 percent of web visitors will abandon a website if it takes too long to load. Furthermore, nearly 70% of online customers say that the time it takes for a webpage to load influences their purchasing decisions. Keep your website up to date, optimize videos and graphics for faster downloads, and use a website host that can handle your bandwidth demands to ensure that it operates smoothly.
8. Have a call to action: Every page on your website should urge visitors to take action. In other words, you must issue a call to action to them. These landing pages should entice visitors to call your organization, sign up for a service, buy a product, download a whitepaper, or does something else that will help you achieve your business objectives. Give them a visible call to action, such as a button, a link, or unambiguous language. If at all feasible, keep it above the fold so that readers don’t have to scroll to discover the call to action.
9. Keep your design simple: Limit the usage of distracting typefaces, colors, and GIFs, which can draw the viewer’s attention away from the website’s main focus. The content is also more scannable and likely to be read if it is presented in short paragraphs and bullet points. Paragraphs should be no more than six lines long. This is especially true when it comes to mobile responsiveness, which is a crucial element in Google’s algorithm for ranking websites. The higher a website’s rating on the search engine results page, the better (SERP). If a competitor’s website is mobile-friendly but yours isn’t, you may be pushed down in search results for your clients.
10. Get personal: E-commerce shops must provide high-quality online experiences in line with the brand perception, much as brick-and-mortar firms invest substantially in their stores to represent their brand images. To that end, your company’s About Us page should not be a dry block of text. To personalize the experience for your customers, include a decent photo of yourself or your team.
11. Make sure your website copy is customer-oriented: Visitors to your website are looking for information that will benefit them. They come for instructive stuff on your blog at times, and they come to research the items and services you sell at other times. In any case, you should provide relevant material that will engage your prospects, provide them with something of value, and increase their confidence in your knowledge. When creating content for your website, attempt to think about it from the perspective of your customers. What information would be useful to you if you were a potential customer? What level of knowledge or expertise do you already have, and what do you need to know more about? By focusing on your material from the customer’s point of view, you can keep them on your site longer and increase your chances of establishing a long-term relationship with them that leads to a sale.
12. Incorporate SEO best practices: Even if you have the best website in your field, it won’t help you if people can’t find it. While you can pay for ads to attract traffic to your website, bringing free organic search traffic to your site is more cost-effective and productive in the long term. People use search engines, particularly Google, to find information on the internet. They usually find what they’re looking for on the first page of search results, so you want your business to show up there. Google and other search engines utilize proprietary algorithms to rank websites based on search terms, commonly known as keywords. Crawling, indexing and ranking are the three methods used by search engines to determine where your item appears. They find your site using links from other sites, which is known as crawling. As a result, make sure your site’s links are displayed on as many external websites as possible After the crawling bots find your site, it is indexed, which means it is examined for information like keywords, freshness, relevancy, links, and multimedia. Make sure your site offers a lot of fresh, relevant material that relates to the keywords you’re trying to rank for.

Finally, ranking is the process through which search engines evaluate which results are the most relevant for a particular query. Relevance and authority are used to rank the sites. Include a lot of useful content, such as individual articles covering many facets of a topic. The size of your site, its traffic, and how many other well-respected sites connect to yours all contribute to its authority. SEO tools for small businesses make it easy to optimize your website.

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