Does My Business Need a Website?
Does your business really need a website? It's a simple question. Happily, the answer's just as simple - YES! Your customers used to find out about your business by looking in the Yellow Pages. How much longer do you think the Yellow Pages book has left? Currently 8 out of 10 of your (potential) customers are using Google, the world's most popular search engine.
A website is an affordable way to promote your business but like all advertising it needs to be well designed and well laid out so that the information your customers want is easy to find. Your website also needs to be easy to find on the world's two most popular sites, Google and Yahoo.
We're not suggesting that you should put all your efforts into selling your products on the Internet but you should at the very least have a presence on the web so that customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer.
It's not enough that you just have a website. You must have a professional looking site if you want to be taken seriously. Since many consumers now search for information online prior to making a purchase, your site may be the first chance you have at making a good impression with a potential customer. So regardless of the size of your business, your website should be designed using some basic principles of good design:
- The webpages/site should be obvious and self-explanatory, easy to follow with quality content.
- Don't test a visitor's patience - stay away from gimmicks, music is a classic example of this.
- Design consistency - consistency shows a professional design and also makes the user "feel at home" while navigating around the site.
- Typography - "everything about fonts" should make the user's life easy. It may have been trendy for designers to make the font size small but what happens when someone wants to read it!
- Keep it simple and make sure everything works.