Having a good website for your small business is very important as it represents your business on the web – the place where increasing number of people are turning to when purchasing products and services. A good website not only brings in more leads that eventually turn into sales, but also gets ranked well in search engines. But, what are the characteristics of a good website? Though there are many characteristics that make a good website, few of them are very crucial in making it a good one. Here are five characteristics of a good website that you need to know to build a great website.
Appearance
As rightly said, ‘first impression is the best impression’. Here, appearance of the website plays a crucial role in attracting and engaging visitors. If the design of your small business website is not appealing, then visitors will leave your site immediately. It is important that the design of your website should be aesthetically pleasing and professional, as it reflects your company, your products and services. Remember, professional design can attract more visitors than flashy or overcrowded design.
Content
Publishing relevant, informational and quality content on your small business website provides visitors with the information they are looking for. This king of content will also help you in improving search engine rankings of your website because search engines give high priority to quality content while ranking a website.
Quality content on your website shows that you are an expert in your field and visitors will be interested in making a purchase from your website as you are able to build trust through your content. Make sure your website content is easy to understand, valuable and solves your visitors’ problems.
Also provide correct address and contact details on your website. This builds credibility and trust for your business and guides your potential customers to reach you.
User-friendly navigation
The pages of the website should be well organized, so that visitors will find it easy to navigate from one page to another. Users generally tend to close the website and skip to another website, if the website is not easy to navigate. So, make sure you build a website that is easy for your visitors to navigate. Provide a search box on your site to make it easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for. Also, use ‘bread crumbs’ on your website as they help your visitors know where exactly they are on the site.
Speed
Time is valuable. If your website is taking a lot of time to load, users will give up and leave your website. There are many factors that affect the loading time such as coding, heavy usage of graphics, server speed, etc. So, you need to focus on all these things and develop a website that loads quickly. One more important thing is that speed load time also considered by search engines like Google while ranking a website.
Domain name
Your website’s domain name is your identity. It helps visitors to find your website on the Internet. It reflects your small business name to the world. Make sure you choose a short domain name because it is easy to remember, read and type.
Nancy R Jones is a writer and blogger for Marvist Consulting LLC which offers small business Internet marketing services. Since establishment in 2005, Marvist’s SEO services have earned the goodwill of clients with uncompromising commitment to business values while delivering expert services. Image courtesy Margaret Ornsby
Nancy, these are great points. I try to do them all. The only one is #5 as I am pretty much stuck with a non-descriptive URL. When I set it up I did not know anything. Now to make a change would be a real pain as I would lose my status with page rank, Alexa, etc. So I am kind of stuck.
Any thoughts?
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Great blog! thanks for sharing these points. As these would play very important part in making website more engaging.