What makes a great small business website?
Is your website working for your customers?
In a competitive market, when similar companies claim to be as good, if not better, how do we stand out? One of our first opportunities to persuade potential customers to come to us instead of the other fellas is our website. As the face of our business, our website has the important job of making the first impression. As business owners, we want that impression to be a positive one.
Consumers purchase from businesses they trust. Trust is given when we can demonstrate our understanding of our customer’s needs, hopes, and desires and is the work we do at Creatively & Co. We help our clients empathize with their audience during our brand development process, which sets the tone and focus for their online content. Our website’s primary responsibility is to generate trust, be user-friendly, and offer relevant content formatted to be found and easily consumed.
The care we demonstrate in our online presence equals the perceived value of our product or service.
Web design is complex. In this article, I do my best to briefly describe the four pillars of a great website, followed by questions that will help your marketing efforts. These four pillars form the foundation of a ‘user-friendly’ website and are the goal for every business.
4 pillars of a user-friendly website:
- User – Person looking for information
- Content – Information they are looking for
- Experience – How they consume the information
- Optimization – How they find the information
User
Person looking for information
A website’s main function is its available and accurate representation of a business, product, or service. At any time, visitors to a website can immediately uncover vital details about our business, such as:
- Who we are
- What we do
- Where we are located
However, today’s small business website needs critical information that is missing from the list above:
- Who we serve
- How we serve them
‘Who we serve’ and ‘how we serve them’ should be our singular marketing focus.
For the most impactful online presence, we need to understand our customers or users. A user is a person looking for information online. A user-friendly website understands who that person is and answers their questions. In the early days of the internet, web designers knew little about the users of the internet. Very little was measurable, making every decision an educated guess. Today’s customers are skeptical, knowledgeable, and have bigger expectations than ever before.
Q: Who is your user?
Knowing our customers informs us of the content that’s valuable to them. We can also use analytics to learn more quantifiable information about our customers, such as their location, what device they are using, how they found us, and what page they landed on.
Content
What are they looking for?
Many small businesses innocently fill the pages of our websites with information about us, our accomplishments, our services, or our products. We mistakenly broadcast, “look at what I do and all I’ve done.” Today’s savvy consumers don’t care about what we’ve done, they care about what they’ve done and are looking for solutions.
Trusting that you are the solution is successful marketing.
Messaging like, “I know what you need and this is how I can help” is much more compelling and influential. While both approaches communicate our expertise, the latter connects with our customers in a meaningful way and appeases their concerns.
Q: How do we create relevant content?
Knowing the overlap of our customers’ goals, needs, and desires and how it relates to what we offer is the first step. By understanding our users, we can define our messaging through tone and focus. If your website doesn’t answer your customer’s questions, hold their attention, or worse, can’t be found, then it doesn’t do anyone any good. Take, for example, a family law office website that features a video panning a wall of degrees and certificates. A visitor who needs the help of a lawyer wants to know whether you have experience helping people like them. A wall filled with degrees misses the opportunity to address their needs. Instead of degrees, a video portraying the emotions of a father winning a custody battle is much more meaningful and impactful. Emotion-driven creative content is our specialty at Creatively and Co.
Experience
How users consume the information?
Web design evolved as business moved online. To hold our attention and improve our online experiences, web designers created advancements in web development. For two decades, marketers and web designers have studied how we consume information online. Noticeable patterns in behavior led to the development of standards in web design called User-Interface design (UI) and User Experience design (UX). Both are equally important for a user-friendly website.
User Interface Design (UI)
User-interface design (UI) is the systemization of web elements like fonts, buttons, and links on a website. Consistency is key. Components that are consistently styled help visitors know what is expected of them while using a website. Thoughtful UI generates trust and branding opportunities that visually align with our business identity.
Q: Is your website branded?
Visitors are more likely to purchase from a business that appears legitimate. Branding gives legitimacy to our product or business. Consistency in a tone of voice in our copy, style of photography and graphics, color scheme, and typefaces all help to further our brand. This matters to potential customers. A well-designed and branded website can immediately communicate additional information about our business, such as our:
- Values
- Professionalism
- Expertise
- Trustworthiness
- Status
- Longevity
Branding is a profoundly transformative process – it changes how our clients perceive our business and how we see ourselves.
User Experience Design (UX)
The more time we spend online, the more accustomed we become to the placement of certain online elements and how they function. The search feature, for example, is usually located on the top-right corner of a page. When a button or link doesn’t behave the way we expect, we get frustrated, which negatively impacts our experience.
Negative user experiences are common with older websites that are antiquated and unresponsive. We all know the frustration of looking up information online only to come upon a dead link, navigation that isn’t clearly defined, dropdown menus that disappear when we move our cursor, or content that is difficult to read. Most especially frustrating is looking for vital information like the elusive ‘contact customer service’ link. These businesses are not putting the user first, therefore, are not user-friendly.
Q: Is your web site easy to use?
Well-designed user-interface (UI) contributes to a positive user experience (UX).
User-friendly websites are analogous to the popular business slogan “the customer is always right.”
Optimization
How do users find you?
Imagine potential customers searching for our product or service, but they can’t contact us because we don’t appear in their search results. Many small business owners are unaware that our website lacks optimization rendering them invisible to browsers. Optimization is necessary for three primary functions: to be found on search engines, load quickly, and viewed on mobile devices.
Q: Can your website be found on Google search?
Optimization is the O in SEO. Lack of optimization in our page titles, image descriptions, text formatting, and featured keywords translates to a lost website. Creating original content in response to our customer’s needs is what Google asks of us. However, we can’t simiply create great content; it has to be optimized for Google’s bots to understand. When done well, we become like a preferred child – getting to ride in the front seat of the search results page.
Q: Does your website load quickly?
A website that loads quickly is crucial for a positive, user-friendly experience on desktop and mobile. Updating outdated websites, optimizing image sizes, and simplifying code can reduce web page loading time.
Q: Can your website be easily read on an iPhone?
The iPhone changed not only how we do business but how we handle our everyday tasks. Web designers now design for mobile-first. Is your website mobile-friendly? We call this responsive design, and all websites must be responsive. Google now punishes sites that aren’t mobile-friendly. In other words, you definitely won’t get to ride in the front s; in fact, you won’t get to ride at all. Optimizing your website to be easily read on all devices is critical.
Q: Do you know how many visitors to Hilton Head Island are visiting your website?
Mobile friendly is especially important while doing business in a tourist destination. Tourists are on the go with mobile in hand. Make sure they can find you in their online search, and when they do, they can easily read and use your website.
Does your website matter to your customer?
A website gives legitimacy to your business and offers so much more than a digital brochure. A compelling, user-friendly website built upon 4 pillars: (1) Content that addresses your customer’s needs, (2) Consistently designed, (3) Formatted to be easily read, and (4) Optimized to be easily found. Improvements in any one of these areas will increase your company’s perceived trustworthiness and can translate into increased engagement or sales.
There remain many local businesses whose online presence consists of a Facebook page, a Yelp rating, or a non-responsive HTML website. Modern websites function as a measuring tool to capture and quantify vital information about those looking to do business with someone like us – information essential to our marketing goals. Without a website, could we be missing out on valuable information about our customers?
As business owners who care about serving our customers, we can communicate this care through a professionally branded website developed with the customer in mind.