Basic Website Design Tips for Small Businesses

If you own a small business, and you want to get into digital marketing, the place to be is on the Internet. You must have an effective online presence in terms of a well-built and hosted website if you want your business to go far. Getting and hosting a website is not rocket science. You can get things done yourself if you have prior experience with websites. What matters most is to have an idea what you want a website for and with the help of so many tools available on the internet, you can package a useful website for your small business. With a small rental fee payable annually in most cases, you can have it hosted for you with all the functionalities in tow. You may not have to do too much to get your website in place, up and running for your digital business. But, be very thoughtful and clear about what you want to achieve then go about it systematically. If you get it right, your business will be better for it.


 
Here are some useful small business website building tips which can help you out.

Choose a Domain Name 

Your domain name will serve as your web address and it must be unique to you and your business. A good domain name must be short, crisp, and easy to spell and remember. It must be devoid of numbers and hyphens. That is the only way it can help promote your business online by being easily SEO-friendly.

Choose a Reputable Website Host

You need a good website hosting firm to launch and support your website on the internet.  To make that choice, what you must consider are hosting fees, support systems and reputation. Consulting other small business owners and searching up on the internet will help you out in making these decisions. What the hosting firm does is to connect your domain name and assign server space to keep the contents of your website on the internet. That is the real technical support your website really needs for it to be searchable and viewed on the internet.

Concise Website Description

You must make it easy for searchers to know who they are dealing with when they hit your website. To achieve that, you must have your “About Us” link on your home page clearly visible and easy to see by your website visitors. This is where your carefully designed logo/image and all other visual representations of your products and services should be displayed. All these with a view to carefully convey to your audience in a very attractive manner, your brand story, history, values, products and even your bragging rights. 

Good Content Management

It is not enough to just have good content on your website, it must be properly managed to attract and keep users on your site long enough to do business with you. For this, you need good content management platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Wix and suchlike platforms you may decide upon. What you get from some of these platforms are many useful plugins, beautiful themes plus active support community. To boot, their installation is easy, largely free and they are very simple to use.

Suitable e-Commerce Platform

A small business website plays the role of a store front office. The reason it must have the requisite e-commerce platform for display and sale of your products. What is important is that the e-commerce platform you choose must be in sync with your type of business. Without that, it will not be very effective. Various e-commerce platforms like Shopify are available out there on the internet for you to choose from and all are easy to deploy and use on your website.

Tips to Write Mobile-Friendly Blog Content

Mobile devices have no doubt revolutionized content marketing. A significant percentage of digital marketers now rely heavily on mobile devices to ply their trade since the world is now on the move 24/7. To reach the huge chunk of mobile devices users effectively, marketers must always find a reliable way to give out mobile-friendly content that is truly appealing to these readers. Here are a few things to thinker with in that quest.

Content Formats 

What is most important to digital marketers is to always find ways to increase the time users spend on their websites. The longer users spend on these sites, the higher the chances of getting them converted to customers. So what to do better to keep readers using mobile devices on websites longer? Just tinker with your content formats, that’s  what. There is evidence that most mobile readers prefer to read multiple content formats rather than just sticking to text. As a content writer, if you want users of mobile devices to spend more time on your website, it is best to stick to a content mix of videos, graphics, images or slideshows side by side with text content. 


 
Headlines and Paragraphs 

You can maintain the flow of your content by keeping your headlines and paragraphs short. Shorter headlines are viewed at a glance while lengthy ones most times are lost beneath the fold. The problem really lies with the size of screens of most mobile devices. The reason you must write to compress your thoughts more tightly while retaining the import of the message. The shorter the headlines and paragraphs on your blog content, the higher the chances of capturing much of the sentences on mobile devices at once.  That saves excessive scrolling around too.

Reading Patterns 

The rule is to write precisely what is easily readable on mobile devices. Reading on a mobile device is way different from reading the same content on other devices like laptops and desktops. On mobile devices, the biggest challenge is screen space which greatly limits vertical or horizontal sweeps on the devices. Many digital marketers now recognize that on mobile devices, most web readers usually view the upper right corner of a website more and that influences their reading patterns. For it to be effective, you can set out your content for mobile devices always with this reading pattern in mind.

Graphics/Images

Heavy and unwieldy images are definitely not mobile-friendly. It is best to use sizeable images and other content formats which are mobile-friendly reasonably. Overusing them is also not advisable. Images take up a sizeable portion of mobile devices’ screen space so, it is advisable to use fewer images. If there are images which do not support the point you are trying to make in your content, it is better you don’t use them at all. 

Pungent Content

To be a successful mobile content writer, you will need a complete overhaul of your own writing skills. Concise writing takes time and practice but it is very essential in case of mobile-friendly content. The point is to adopt writing skills which make your content highly compelling and your argument strong within the shortest possible space. The emphasis is to always tighten the content without necessarily shortening it so as not to lose the import of the message in the process.