1 – Start with preparing a website strategy

Any successful small business website has one commonality: a well thought through strategy. With a plan in place, you’re teed off for success when it comes to supporting lead generation goals. Your website plan should answer the following ten questions:  

Who is your audience? What is your website’s goal or goals? (Rank and prioritize them!) What functionality will your website have? (what’s critical and what’s a ‘nice to have’?) What information do you need/want to give website visitors?

2 – Set a clear page hierarchy 

After you have developed the overall goals and a blueprint with tips on creating a website for your business, the next step is making it easy for website visitors to find content. To do this, make sure your page hierarchy is clear.  

Social Media Today suggests bucketing your content by theme and importance. Try physically drawing a plan as you create a high-level outline. Most people freeze up at this point so it’s important to visualize your website structure!

3 – Keep it (so so) simple

Simple design and text are essential to an effective small business website. An overly complicated website doesn’t convert. Too many page elements lead to website visitor confusion.  

So, long story short, uncluttered visuals and text have the most significant impact on your audience. And, while we’re on the subject of simplicity, keeping your color scheme minimal is key, too. Two to three colors is all you need to make an impact.  

Be pragmatic in your color selection and fortify the use of white space within your small business website design.  

“This is not the time to show off your design acumen, with lots of distracting sounds and lights on the site and every icon known to web-kind,” says Nationwide.