Why Website Design Is Important For Small Businesses

Websites are essential for most businesses, but for a small business, they can be the difference between resounding success or failure. From engaging your customers to showcasing, selling your products and elevating your brand, a well-made website has the power to drive your business success and future growth.

But what does well-made mean? 

In this blog, we’ll cover the essential functions a well-designed website should perform, and why these can elevate your business.

1. Provide Information
   When customers are interested in a product or service related to your industry, Google is usually the first place they’ll go. Your website should be there to meet them, providing a streamlined experience with all the information they need to become better informed and ideally, compelled to make a purchase. By being a key source of sought-after info, you have the chance to become an authority in your space, to attract interested customers and to be the first source of information in search, gaining traffic as a result. Understand your customer, what they are searching for, then provide it, through detailed website copy and engaging blog posts.
    
   
2. Capture Leads
   Capturing leads is an essential function of a website and refers to any part of your website that has users submit their information. In doing so, their details are added to a database and you are able to engage them through email marketing campaigns or offerings that will help to convert them from interested audience to paying customer. The best way to do this, is through the offer of an incentive. White papers/free ebooks, a monthly newsletter, or a discount on a first purchase are all conventional ways of capturing leads on their first visit to your site.
   
   
3. Showcase Your Brand
   The shift from physical retail to online has caused a significant change in how businesses showcase their brands. The in-store experience is now the online experience and everything from how your website is designed, to how the site is navigated and the content provided helps to create a perception of your brand and business in the eyes of your customer. You should look at every aspect of your website as a chance to showcase your personality, with a great web designer being able to capture this and create an online experience that builds brand equity with every visit.
   
   
4. Improve Visibility
   A well-designed, user friendly website is also essential for ensuring you’re visible to people searching for your products or services. In addition to performing well and being mobile friendly, your website should be keyword-rich, with great content and regular, informative blog posts that continually prioritise your website via search engine optimisation.
   
   
5. Sell Products
   The recent COVID-19 lockdown period has been a stark reminder of the essential nature of ecommerce. Without the need for a physical store location and with fewer overheads, to the ability to be ‘always-open’ and sell to customers all over the world, e-commerce provides all small businesses with the opportunity to grow exponentially. In saying this, a good and bad e-commerce experience are worlds apart and to do things well, you need a smart platform, great website content and a seamless user experience. 
   
   Tools like Shopify and WooCommerce are great options for small businesses with different solutions being more appropriate based on your business needs. 
   
   These are just a few of the essential functions a website can perform for your small business. While many of these may be obvious, the difficult part can be knowing where to start. There are countless options out there and with the cost of web development varying significantly based on your requirements, it can often feel tough to make a call on what you need and whether it will deliver the results you want. 
   
   Understanding this problem, we created a simple solution for small business owners looking to gain an edge, without the hefty price tag. Our Brave Subscription Packages tailor a website, or ecommerce solution to you, with affordable monthly payments helping you manage the cost while your website gets to work growing your business. 
   
   You can check them out here.