Chicago Web Design
Small business owners seeking to make their business more profitable or stable need not overlook the benefits of creating a website. Websites for small businesses offer amazing new opportunities that are otherwise unavailable. We have put together a list of what you are missing out on my not having a website for your small business.
Gaining credibility on a larger scale - Small business owners may have established their credibility with their regular customers or within a radius of a few miles. If they wish to build more credibility and share their expertise with more people than ever before, establishing a website where they can provide this information through articles, blogs, and videos is a great way to do this.
Molding Identity - Maintaining a website is a great way for a business to effectively mold how they would like to be perceived by patrons and others in the industry. It allows a company to have more control over the information that is provided on them and to have a better look into what people are saying about them.
Housing their own community - Unless they're a coffee shop, providing a place where customers can get together and offer advice and share ideas can be pretty tough to accomplish. Having a website for a business can provide a place for patrons to do this easily by offering chat space, instant messengers, and comment room for company blogs and articles. This proves to be important because it gets people discussing a company's products and services.
Generating more leads - It can be difficult to generate leads as it is, but the web can make it a lot easier. When a business establishes a website, they then establish an incredibly effective way to build leads. There are some great ways to do this: developing a social media following, gaining blog followers, providing forms on the website to collect submitted information, and building successful email marketing campaigns.
Establishing more professional contacts - Networking with others in the industry is crucial to a company's success. The ability to share information and ideas with other professionals and build a relationship with them is key to building a successful company. When a company has a website they are able to create more contacts quickly and easily by letting everyone know who they are.
Interaction with more customers - A company positively interacting with their customer is imperative to maintaining and gaining loyal patrons. Customers have the right and a want to feel connected on a personal level to the company they are spending their money with. Having a website where they can interact with a company easily and directly communicate with them lays the ground work for a great business. Tying social media accounts in with a website is suggested if a company wants to optimize their relationship with their customers. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have provided superb platforms for companies to take advantage of.
Web Design
Yes, believe it or not, your website design should not concentrate on what you want or what you would like to see in your website, but it is about what your customers want from your website and its design. You can get website designers to make great looking website for yourself, however you cannot get customers to visit and re-visit your website just because you have got a great looking website or you cannot convert visitors in customers just because you have a great looking website design. Neither do you need a website that offers a lot of functionality if your customers don't need that functionality. If you are selling flowers, the functionality your customers desire from your website will be different to the functionality available on a tyre manufacturer's website. So in simple terms you need to develop a website design and functionality that your customers expect from your type of business.
What should I be aiming at?
Even before you go to a see a designer to undertake website design for your business, I would recommend that you do your fieldwork.
It would be useful to understand:
i) Who your audience is: This probably is the most important step before you go and see a website designer to develop a website for your company. You have to understand who your audience is. Try and estimate who are the people who would regularly come to my website?
ii) What does my audience expect: once you identify your audience, the next step is to understand what your audience expect from your website design? Understanding this will not only help you understand the path you should take with your design, but will also help you explain your requirement to your website designer.
iii) What will bring my audience back: An important aspect of a good design and a successful website is the ability to bring the visitors back. In marketing terms, it is like customer retention. For any business it is important to retain customer loyalty, similarly for any successful website, the ability to bring back your customers is paramount. Customer loyalty leads to increase in traffic. Look at some of the successful websites around you: amazon.com, YouTube, MySpace. The success of these websites is an example of the power of customer retention and referrals. If you analyse the website design of these sites, it is fairly simple but it offers its visitors what they need: products and services that matter to their audience.
If you think through the above points, you will realise that a lot of information is already available to you (especially if you are an established business). Your website in many terms is an extension of your physical business. The above mentioned information should be available to you in terms of corporate knowledge. Talk to your sale people, look at your customer files and your sales pattern, try and source information from your suppliers. For a new business, it could include analysing your competitors.
In conclusion, I would remind you that try and understand your market before you undertake any part of website design or website development process. Without knowing your market you won't be able to communicate your requirement to your designer. It is important to go through this process before you start website development instead of re-inventing the loop after you have developed your website and realised after one year that you are not getting enough leverage from your web design. At the end of the day you will only achieve from your design what you tell your website designer.
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