Why you need a website for your business?

Introduction

Being in a business and ensuring its profitability is quite a hassle! Moreover, having a well-maintained website is a necessity else your clients may perceive you to be tech-averse in the digital age. The business needs to have a distinct yet authoritative identity.

A significant misconception we have about a website is that you should be able to sell your products on the platform from day 1. Though e-commerce websites are quite common, it is not the only reason to have a website. Your website is one of the most important media to interact with the external world. It is an easy way to send out marketing messages to the world. Your website can entice new prospects whom you can attract your customers.

Benefits of having a website

Gain credibility. The first thing we do before we buy anything, we search online for any information and reviews about those products. You need to gain credibility fast. People also search online for solutions to their problems and to compare prices between competitive products. We can also get information about a business before they purchase from them. If you don’t have a website, potential customers will go to your competitors who do, especially if you are a home-based business without a bricks-and-mortar address.

Create a brand for your firm. Like all businesses, your entity also needs to have a distinct yet authoritative identity. First, you need to understand your firm’s objective and craft a buyer persona of your target market. Keeping this in mind, you need to formulate the brand values that underline what your clients can expect while working with you.

Once you have your brand values in place, you can go ahead to create a visual image of your brand. This can be in the form of a logo or a symbol. The website design template should include the colours approved during the branding exercise.

Content is King. Content has been the buzzword. Today, you need to create compelling content for your website while stressing on what your unique selling proposition (USP) is. So how do you get to know what you should write on your website? Tracking social signals can provide significant inputs about what the target market wants and how your services will benefit the target market. Do inform your content writers about KISS – Keep It Short and Simple. Too much content may turn visitors away from the website.

The content should be enriched with relevant keywords. Various third-party tools like Google Adwords Keyword Planner or Google Trends can provide suggestions with details about the average search volume. You need to maintain optimum keyword density and refrain from stuffing content with keywords.

You need to have a blog section as an integral part of your website. You can put up relevant content about the critical challenges faced by your industry.

Highlight your Credentials

A best practice is to dedicate a separate webpage to showcase clients by including client names and logos. Client testimonials is an easy way to establish credibility. You need to create case studies covering the issues faced, how you overcame them, and how it benefited the client.

The website can also have a list of all awards and recognition that your organisation may have won. You can also put up snaps of your team attending any event as delegates.

Create a hook. The nature of any legal firm’s business requires them to develop long-term relationships. Harp on your major USPs and benefits that your portfolio brings for clients. The main message from the website needs to be above the fold. The website also needs to have call-to-actions at various places across the site. While at one place, the user may request for subscription to the newsletter while at another they may download a company overview. Videos also prove to be an effective medium to entice users.

Long-term cost savings. In the short-term, it does take some amount of money to build a website. However, if you accumulate the costs of offline advertising over time, you will find that the costs will be significantly more. Of late, some businesses will help you create a website for meagre amounts.

Keeps your customer informed about you. Your website is an effective way of introducing your customers to your new launches, letting them know about the benefits of your new products, publicising any upcoming promotions. The website can also be used for posting tips, and online resources like blogs, articles and newsletters. Industry news, as well as company communication, can also be posted on the website. The website can be used to provide current information and news.

Always available. Maybe, someone could be interested in your portfolio right now. How will you ensure they are able to access information about you? Your website is always open. It allows you to provide your customers to review your products and services whenever at their convenience. Your prospects will also be enticed to do business with you after going through any positive reviews. There are numerous interactive features and add-ons available by which the website visitors can contact you and interact with you. It could be signing up for your newsletter, scheduling appointments as well as purchasing online directly through your website at their convenience. It helps to gather leads very fast.

User experience is critical. You may use any CMS based software like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, or Drupal for your website. CMS' allow to customise the colours to be used on the site. You can utilise the brand colours at relevant portions of the website.

Functionality is a critical factor that determines user experience. Is the website easily navigable? Are there any broken links or is the loading time within the permissible limit? Is the website mobile friendly? If any visitor wishes to subscribe to your newsletter, can they do this with ease and do you have any automated email welcoming them?

Make content searchable. The website needs to be Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) ready as per the white hat SEO techniques. It starts with the URL of the website. It is ideal for including the targeted keywords in the website URL itself, depending on the availability of the domain name.

Having an SEO friendly code is in your hands. The URLs are the first pieces that are scanned by the search engines. Various plug-ins allow optimising URLs for all website pages. Similarly, there are plug-ins for compressing images and for providing alternate text for images. All these carry SEO value. Internal linking is also an effective way to improve SEO value. The website needs a sitemap to allow search engines to crawl the site easily.

Problems faced by businesses while creating a website

Experience of the user. A few years ago, smartphones did not exist. The web was altogether a different place. 75% of people have judged the credibility of a company based on its website design. We must utilise the services of a vendor who has a great design team. Your corporate branding is dependent on the design of your website. Today, the sites are expected to be very simple but customer-oriented. At most times, even the smallest UI elements matter. Moreover, if there are issues in user experience on your website, it will lose visitors, and your search engine rank will also go down.

Difference in viewpoint with the vendor. Anyone who has worked with a web developer must know that we need to be detailed about the product. We will need to mention all the features and functionalities at one go. The vendor will not accept any changes in the middle of the project. Is this why you are spending your money. The overall cost of the project can change substantially based on seemingly minor requirements that end up making some existing platform a wrong choice.

Cost of a new website. It all starts with the selection of the vendor. You may have to select the vendor amongst numerous others. Again, the scope of work and the commercials would be different across all the vendors participating against your request. It would be challenging to bring all the proposals on a common platform. Moreover, the cost of web development is usually very high and would surely burn a hole in your budget.

Maintenance of the website. Your vendor will again ask for a fortune for maintaining the site. Even if you have a make a minor change in the website, you may have to shell out a significant amount. Your vendor may have used a platform they are experts at. But you have no idea about the software. So, you are always at their disposal if there is a need to put up updates at your website. This is where they make a killing.

Hosting services. Your vendor may have their partnerships with some of the leading hosting service providers. They would provide you with a composite pricing model that you would have to provide your consent to. You do not have any inkling about their security processes and procedures. What are their credentials? Will their security processes be able to prevent any cyber-attack? So, why wait? Contact a vendor who works quickly right now.

Who can be of help?

There could be numerous entrepreneurs who would have liked to start with a website, but their fear of lacking technical skills prevented them from doing so. We understand that the development phase is crucial while you are creating a website. You may not be tech-savvy and require your website up and running within a matter of minutes.

You will need an expert who could make your website in either of these platforms.   
 

WordPress is the most popular platform of choice for building websites. Moreover, it is amongst the most robust content management and blogging platforms available. It is estimated that almost 75 million sites are running on Word Press; that would be nearly 34% of CMS market share.

Shopify has gradually been one of the platforms of choice for e-commerce. Being cloud-based and hosted, Shopify removes the need for maintaining software or servers. You only plug into an internet connection and get going. With over 600,000 merchants, Shopify is one of the biggest e-commerce platforms in the world.

The WooCommerce plug-in is an open-source eCommerce solution built on WordPress. The current 2019 market share for WooCommerce is 22% of the top 1 million sites using eCommerce technologies.

Conclusion

These are some of the critical factors that need to be considered when you are visualising your website. The online medium is currently one of the significant scientific sources of having inbound leads. To get started, you will need the help of a professional who works quickly and can guide you through the entire process designing and commissioning of your website.