Website Design Basics for Small Businesses
Yes, most small businesses should have a website – and there are a lot of website designers that will be happy to build a website for you. At Third Marble, we talk to a lot of small business owners and ask them about their website designers. What we’ve learned is MOST web designers fall in to one of these three categories:
- The guy that used to be a graphic artist.
- The guy that used to be a programmer.
- The guy that used to be in advertising.
For small businesses, you typically can’t hire a team of diverse professionals and a project manager to build a website, so you hire “a guy that builds websites”, right?
The problem is, none of the guys above can deliver a Business Generating Website. Why not?
Well, the former graphic artist can deliver a website that looks very nice – but usually doesn’t have the Basic Search Engine Optimization. You need basic SEO to even have a chance of anyone finding your website on Google. They also tend to build websites that don’t convert very well – in other words, they’re great “ads” for your business, but they’ll often lack the strategies for “Direct Response” – ie. you want phone calls, but these sites will hide phone numbers on the “ Contact Us ” page instead of “cluttering up the site design” with information. So – if your customers can’t find your website, and if they do, they have to hunt for your phone number, all you have is a pretty website.
The former programmer is the polar opposite – the site is written using custom code, so the aesthetics are poor and the design is frequently very boxy. Sometimes they may know a little about SEO, but again they rarely know anything about designing a website for converting visitors to phone calls. The other negative we’ve seen with hiring a former programmer is they want to custom code everything – which means as new browsers, cell phones, tablets and other technologies emerge, your website may not render correctly on all these devices and you’ll have to re-build your site more frequently.
The former advertising guru can usually deliver a good looking website that converts well. They usually don’t know much about technology or SEO, so you have the same basic problem – no traffic to the website.
To have a Business Generating Website , you need a few basic ingredients. It’s rare to find a single person with all the needed skills to build you the complete package.
What are these basic ingredients?
- Nice, professional look to attract quality customers.
- Basic SEO in place to bring in Relevant Traffic.
- Basic traffic converting elements – phone number, call to action, reason to contact you.
- Good technology that will render your site on all the current browsers and devices (in easy to navigate and read formats).
- Quality copy that inspires readers to contact you.
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