Small Business Website Design for the Beginner

Making your own small business website can be a bit intimidating. You're worried about making a good online impression for your business. You want to be sure that the website works correctly and is something that will help your business.

Use a Content Management System

Using a free, open source Content Management System like WordPress will allow you, as a beginner, to make a professional looking and expandable website comparatively quickly. You don't need to know how to write HTML code to get a WordPress website up and running. Thousands of free plugins are available to add an amazing amount of functionality. Free and low-cost WordPress themes make it easy to create the look, feel and layout you want very easily.

Use branding

Your business website must be an extension of your existing small business. Incorporate the branding, colors scheme, logos and attitude of your business into your new site. If you have a physical commercial location get photos of it on the site along with photos and information on your products or services.



What is the goal?

What is the primary goal you have for your small business website? It could be to drive customers to your physical location, use it to advertise your services, get the phone ringing with orders or any number of things. Whatever your goal is make sure you can clearly define it and you can clearly measure your progress towards that goal. Just saying "we need a website" and throwing one up online is a pointless exercise. Define a goal and work towards it.

Don't get crazy

The biggest hurdle most small business owners run into when they make their first business website is they want this shockingly amazing thing. They want all the bells and whistles, crazy flash intro pages, music that automatically starts playing when you visit the site (please don't do this) and useless resource sucking animations that do nothing to advance the goal of the website. They spend hours obsessing over font choices, image border width, tiny spacing options and imperceptible differences in color shades. Hair is pulled out in clumps over trying to make impossibly complicated sign-up forms and huge chunks of time wasted reinventing the wheel in any number of ways. They spend all this time frantic over the.001% of the site that makes very little difference and completely miss the big picture. Don't be one of these folks.

The First Step in making your own Small Business Website

Your first step is to get a simple and clean website online that your customers can find. Put your contact information on there. Put some directions to your shop on there too with a photo of the store front. Stick a picture of yourself and your employees on there as well. Tell your web visitors what you do, where you do it, why you do it better than anyone else and give them your phone number. Start from there and then, after it's going, see what you need next.

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