10 Things to Have in Mind While Launching Your Business Website
Business never sleeps. It surely doesn’t when you are online and offering your services & products on a nicely designed website. Yes, it all starts with a beautiful website. With the blessing of this digital age, any business irrespective of its form starts with a website. This is why it’s too crucial to building a website that really sells.
There are many stages of building websites for your business like selecting a domain name, getting hosting, choosing platforms to build your site on, and having the right tools to create the site with. Here, in this article, you are going to know about some of the crucial things you must do while launching a business website.
Make sure you focus on each point and have a flying start with your business website. So, let’s begin talking about them.
10 Things to Have in Mind While Launching Your Business Website
After a quality research and detailed analysis, we made a list of 10 important things you must have in mind in order to launch your business website. Let's go into the details of each of them one by one.
Competitor Analysis
Before you build a website, it’s better to check how the competitors in your niche built theirs. Without having a clear understanding of how others are doing. It’s really hard for you to survive let alone make a profit. Check the strategy your competitors follow, understand how they showcase their products and see how often they make changes in their designs. Analyze, then decide what is best for you.
UX and UI
Users are what the site is made for. Google cares a lot about user experience. The search engine may collect some user interaction data and then use them to generate search results. Your site design is what visitors will see and experience.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” - Steve Jobs, co-founder, Ex-Chairman & CEO of Apple Inc.
Your site’s design and functionality have a greater impact on your business. They play an important role in converting visitors to customers.
- Wireframing: It is a way to design a website layout at the structural level. Your decision to place different types of contents on the pages and set up the functionality by taking user needs and user journeys into account is all about wireframing.
- Design: Design is how your website will look. How you place contents and visuals on different parts of the website.
- Typography: No matter how you design your website it will surely have text contents, the font family, font size, font weight for those text contents are the parts of typography. It has a tremendous impact on your site’s look.
- Visuals: For different purposes, you can have images, GIFs, videos to present your site more elegantly.
Website Copywriting
The way you tell your visitors about your business, services, and products convinces them to convert. Your website copywriting plays an important part here. Make sure your website content adds value and goes well with your business. To have better copywriting, you need to proofread your content and use proper formatting, then update content as things change in your business.
You can create a content map. Also, you can check your content with Grammarly.
Product & Service Showcasing
Services and products are what your business is about. While having them online for people to buy, it’s important how you present them. Literally, it is not only about how but also about what you present them with.
"A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large." - Henry Ford
- Features: Your products or services will surely have some specialties. Present those features in a way that attracts visitors.
- Visuals: Some of the features would require images, GIFs, videos to tell visitors what they are and how they work. Add relevant visuals to products/services page.
- Testimonials: Upon having user reviews of your products/services, you can place them on the showcase pages to convince potential customers.
- Pricing Table: Design a pricing table that mostly highlights the attractive features of your services.
Search Engine Optimization
Optimizing your website for search engines is the key to be available for the people who are looking for the services you offer. It helps you be on the Search Engine Result Pages and drive traffic to your site. There are several ways you can optimize your website for search engines. You can set up the titles with keywords, add meta descriptions and schema markup, index site in different search engines, map keywords for important pages and more.
It’s better to use a template for your site that has already taken care of the SEO issues. There are many SEO ready templates out there for you to try. Click here to explore some SEO friendly Joomla templates.
Here are 4 key SEO issues you can address.
- Meta Description: It's a text snippet of certain character length summarizing a page’s content. Meta descriptions are shown in search results especially when the searched phrase is within the description.
- Schema Markup: Tell the search engines what your data means with schema markup. Using the special microdata language, inform search engines much more about your content.
- Search Engine Indexing: Indexing refers to the inclusion of a web page's content into search engines. This is the first step to be available on the search results.
- Keyword Mapping: Map keywords for your important pages, homepage and category pages.
Make Your Website Responsive
In a mobile-first world, so you must consider the mobile layouts for your website. As the mobile devices share a major percentage of the search made on different search engines. If your website doesn’t fit into smaller devices, you will potentially lose a substantial number of website traffic for sure. That will affect your business eventually.
"Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform, and orientation." - Smashing Magazine
There are some tools like SP Page Builder that can help you create responsive websites. Read this detailed guideline on how to make a website perfectly responsive with SP Page Builder.
Site Speed
Even after taking care of the SEO issues, you can still be far behind in the Search Engine Results Pages because of poor loading time. Google takes lite loading issue seriously. Most importantly, in this age of voice search, with a poor site loading time, you will lose a potential number of traffic to your site. There are a lot of things that affect your site speed such as, file size, hosting, and more. Here are the 5 ways you can address these issues.
- Store media files (images, GIFs, videos) on a Content Delivery Network aka CDN. This will potentially reduce the load time and speed up your site.
- Optimize images on your website. It's better to avoid BMP or TIFF images and stick to JPEGs and PNGs. Also, you should avoid empty image src code lines.
- Minify HTML/CSS/JavaScript resources.
- Go for a faster hosting solution. You can test multiple vendors, read reviews on various unbiased forums and communities and pick the right hosting service to host your site.
- Remove render-blocking JavaScript and CSS
Read this tutorial on how to speed up your Joomla website.
Newsletter Subscription
People who visit your site might be interested in receiving new stuff from you. Have a system to let people subscribe to your newsletter. Place a newsletter subscription form on some important areas of your site. You can also show newsletter subscription form on a popup.
Outreach and Advertising
Just having products or services and a website to display them will not do business. You have to reach people with them. Initially, you may not get traffic from search. You have to reach another similar website, build backlinks. You can also advertise your products on different platforms to get greater exposure.
Analytics and Insights
You have to track the performance of your website. How the products are being sold, how the visitors are being converted. You can check such insights with Google Analytics. Get a deeper understanding of your visitors and customers. Google Analytics gives you the free tools you need to analyze data for your business in one place.
Businesses these days largely depend on the website as people who your products are for will be there. So, building a beautiful website and showcasing your business online is the right way to do business in this age. Whether you want to build a website or you already have one, this article of 10 things to have in mind while launching your business website will be beneficial for you.
Rayhan Arif
