4 Things Every Small Business Needs to Include on Their Website

Every small business needs to have a website. It might seem like a waste of money when you can set up accounts on a variety of social media platforms for free but having a dedicated and professional-looking website will improve your image and will just look way more professional than social media profiles do. But if your website is going to be useful to your customers, it needs to have the following features.

A Simple Memorable URL

Your website’s URL is like a brand name. Just like a brand name, your URL should be catchy, memorable, and easy to remember. Even if most of your users aren’t coming to your website via the URL – many will be arriving from a search engine result or from your social media pages – it is still important that the URL is simple for those that do choose to access your services that way.

But one of the best reasons to keep your URL simple and memorable is the boost you will get to your SEO. If you register a long URL or one that’s broken up by multiple dashes, you will pay for it in a reduced SEO score and a more difficult time raising and maintaining it.

A Clear Description of Your Business

A business website that doesn’t make it immediately clear what the business does has already failed in one of its most important goals. Someone who stumbles across your business website without any clue of who you are or what you do should be able to find this information out as quickly and easily as possible. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to tell them everything on your homepage; you can leave the detail for your ‘About Us’ page.

Easy Navigation

Your website should be easily navigable, even to someone who has never visited the site before. Some business websites will be more complex than others. If you are operating a full-blown e-commerce website, then you will need different pages for different products and pages for each of your categories.

The most popular solution to handling a large number of navigable pages is to use collapsing menus such as hover-over and hamburger menus. Navigation is one of the hardest bits of web design to get right. It’s worth spending the money to hire a Web Design Surrey business to build an easy-to-navigate website for you. This is definitely preferable to leaving your users to stumble awkwardly around your site.

Easily Accessible Contact Information

One of the key functions of any business website is to serve as a natural point of contact between you and your customers. Anyone who visits your website should easily be able to find a way of contacting you directly. This can be as simple as placing your email address in the footer of each page, but many businesses prefer to add in a dedicated contact form that customers fill out to send you an email.

Building an effective business website isn’t rocket science, but it does require some careful thought. Make sure that you begin your web design by ensuring that all the fundamental elements are in place. You can always refine things later, but it’s good to get those key bits down first.