Website Design Basics for Small Businesses

Yes, most small businesses should have a website – and there are a lot of website designers that will be happy to build a website for you.  At Third Marble, we talk to a lot of small business owners and ask them about their website designers.  What we’ve learned is MOST web designers fall in to one of these three categories:

For small businesses, you typically can’t hire a team of diverse professionals and a project manager to build a website, so you hire “a guy that builds websites”, right?

The problem is, none of the guys above can deliver a Business Generating Website.  Why not?

Well, the former graphic artist can deliver a website that looks very nice – but usually doesn’t have the  Basic Search Engine Optimization.  You need basic SEO to even have a chance of anyone finding your website on Google.  They also tend to build websites that don’t convert very well – in other words, they’re great “ads” for your business, but they’ll often lack the strategies for “Direct Response” – ie. you want phone calls, but these sites will hide phone numbers on the “ Contact Us ” page instead of “cluttering up the site design” with information.  So – if your customers can’t find your website, and if they do, they have to hunt for your phone number, all you have is a pretty website.

The former programmer is the polar opposite – the site is written using custom code, so the aesthetics are poor and the design is frequently very boxy. Sometimes they may know a little about SEO, but again they rarely know anything about designing a website for converting visitors to phone calls.  The other negative we’ve seen with hiring a former programmer is they want to custom code everything – which means as new browsers, cell phones, tablets and other technologies emerge, your website may not render correctly on all these devices and you’ll have to re-build your site more frequently.

The former advertising guru can usually deliver a good looking website that converts well.  They usually don’t know much about technology or SEO, so you have the same basic problem – no traffic to the website.

To have a Business Generating Website , you need a few basic ingredients.  It’s rare to find a single person with all the needed skills to build you the complete package.

What are these basic ingredients?

If you found this helpful, please take a moment and click the “+1” button below.

The post Website Design Basics for Small Businesses appeared first on Third Marble Marketing.