Best Practices for Small Business Websites

Your website is one of the most important components in your online marketing strategy. Whether you are developing a new website or fixing an existing one, you can follow these tips to capture more leads and convert the leads into sales.

• Create a compelling landing page with a clear call to action. You get only a few seconds of the user’s attention and you have to work hard to retain the user and make him/her do the desired action (subscribing to a list, trying your product etc). Have only one call to action and make that action very prominent. Get inspired from these 50 great examples of landing page design. Apart from the main landing page, you can also customize special landing pages for each marketing campaign.

• Go easy on navigation. Your site must make it easy for people to navigate the website. Do not try to be too creative in menu design. Put the menu items where people expect it to be. Common items like about, contact, product features could be featured in the menu. If you are a small business stick to less than five items in the main menu. Here is a great article to help you get started with effective navigation and here are 8 best practices in navigation.

• Use a consistent color scheme. Pick two colors that best reflect your brand and stick to them. Don’t have three or more colors in a page. Here are 50 great samples of good color palette usage from which you can gain some inspiration.

• Pay attention to typography. The fonts used on your site can make or break your website. Do not use more than two font styles in your pages. Here are 8 typography resources for you to build a site with great fonts.

• Try to keep the page simple. If you are a startup don’t try to sound like a large corporation. People connect better with small companies if they can keep their pages simple and display distinctive design.

• Add demo videos in the home page. A quick two-minute tour of the product can do a great bit of selling for many small businesses. Get a professional voice artist to do the demo.

• Include customer testimonials prominently in the website. Get them from your emails or Linkedin testimonials and if you don’t have any, call up your good customers and ask them for a line or two about your company/product.

• Include an attractive, relevant profile image in every page. When people share your page in Pinterest or Facebook, the tools try to pick a thumbnail from the page and if there is no good image, there is less chance that the share will be successful.

• Work on fast loading times. Your users are impatient and so is Google. They can’t wait ten seconds for your page to load. Slow websites are punished by Google with poorer search rankings and can irritate whatever remaining visitors coming to the site. Your pages must load instantly and you have to work on optimizing it if your page is too slow. To check where your page can be optimized, you can use the free GTMetrix tool.

• Create a sitemap for your site and link it in your website. A sitemap organizes the list of all pages in your website. Once you have a created your sitemap, take care to test out all the links. You can create a free XML sitemap with this tool.

• Validate your code with W3C validator tool. The tool will find the mistakes in HTML and CSS usage and point to the errors. Staying close to the standards will help you provide a consistent experience across all browsers.

• Test your website for browser compatibility, load etc. Here are 7 good tools to make your testing easier.