If you are a startup, doing business or planning to start one it becomes very important to have a website, which acts as the face of your business. Internet together with technology has become an enabler of businesses. Gone are the days when only handing over a visiting card and explaining what you do was enough.
Having a website has become an integral part of doing a business and is not an optional thing that you can live without. Customers, suppliers, dealers and all the entities which deal with you or are planning to do business with you would visit your website to understand more about your company, vision, mission, products, services, which in turn creates trust, reliability, authenticity and establishes the credibility of your business.
Building a website can be broken down into 3 parts
- Aesthetics - Consistency in look and feel.
- Technology – How to build a website efficiently in the most optimum manner.
- Marketing - How to present your business to the world.
Aesthetics
A website should
- Be Well designed
- Have a good site navigation
- Information should be clear, concise and clutterless and easy to find
- Have a relevant Domain Name
- Enable people to contact you easily
- Provides value to the visitor
- Have good colour and fonts
- User-friendly, high-quality visuals,
- Have trust indicators, helpful and relevant content,
- Better Readability
- Good Layout
All Design elements should work together seamlessly creating an organized and professional look and feel.
A website should be easy to navigate, beautiful, and packed with features that allow customers to accomplish their goals easily. It should be effective and carefully planned out to give users easy access to the information they need.
Technology
Irrespective of which technology stack is used, whether it is open source, custom developed in PHP, or build using a Microsoft ASP.NET most of the tech stack have matured and any of the above technologies can be used.
- Only ensure that a website should be
- Compatible across all browsers and devices
- SEO optimized
- Updated regularly
- Search engine friendly
- Mobile friendly
- Have Fast loading time
- Accessible and credible content
Marketing
Website is not only the face of your business but it has also become a very important channel and source of lead generation in gaining and acquiring customers.
The following points are critical and should always be kept in mind while building a website.
- To have a Proper Value Proposition (why are you here on the internet).
- List of products and services along with the portfolio.
- List of clients and what they have to say (Testimonials) about your business.
- Have a proper marketing funnel to capture, nature and convert leads.
- Provision to write blogs, in case you plan to create awareness, educate and generate leads using this medium.
- Create a proper content strategy to generate attention, interest, desire and action.
Websites should be designed for consistent branding and is a great place to showcase your entire business in great detail.