Building a Professional Business Website: 4 Critical Components
Whether your business is a small local shop, an online store just getting off the ground, or an already well-established corporate enterprise – a professional website is a must-have. It’s your salesperson, marketing tool, and info hub, available anytime, anywhere. However, there’s not much chance your website will help you achieve your business goals if its foundation is shaky. In this article, we will talk about the four most important components that make a good website.
1. It all starts with technology
The first choice you’ll have to make is how your website is going to be built. There are various paths you can take: you could go the traditional way, custom-coding your website from scratch, or stick with no-code platforms. Or you could build your site with a content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal.
For e-commerce and corporate websites, we lean toward the final choice. A good CMS will provide your team with all the tools you need to build a functional website, but it will also give developers leeway to delve into the system’s code and customize its built-in modules and themes to your business’s needs.
If you decide to go with a CMS, there are a few things to consider:
- Is your platform of choice scalable? Does it provide room for growth?
- Does the platform offer all the features your design needs? Does it integrate well with external solutions? How flexible is it when it comes to custom coding?
- Will it be accessible to non-technical users? How difficult is it to add new content to the website and manage existing one?
- Is the platform known for its mobile experience optimization options?
- Is it secure? Protecting your and your users’ data is essential.
The decision you’ll make at this point will shape the whole development and site management process. That’s why we strongly advise choosing a reliable system like Drupal, that has a strong community, diverse features, and customization possibilities. You don’t want to get stuck for years with an unscalable, rarely updated platform that’s not favored by most developers.
Want to know what else makes a CMS business-ready? Take a look at what Drupal experts from Smartbees have to say!
2. Content is king…
As Bill Gates famously said, content truly is the king. In the process of developing a website, it should (most of the time, at least) precede the design. Why? Because your potential clients visit your website for the content, and not for the aesthetic. Of course, the latter is extremely important in a different way – but we’ll get to that later.
There are three main points that every business has to consider before writing down the first headings on your homepage.
Information structure
What subpages do you need to fill up with content? Every website – whether it’s a growing store, a news site, or a Fortune 500 company’s official website – needs a compelling homepage that makes readers hungry for your content. But after that? Probably no business will make it without attractive service/product pages, where you can highlight your offerings. Most will also have a classic “About Us” subpage and a blog/resource section, which is incredibly important in terms of building your brand, authority, and positioning.
Messaging
If you know what type of content you want to put on your website – you have to figure out what message will underlie each sentence, picture or even a pie chart. After all, your content is there to sell – either your products/services or your brand’s image and vision.
Keywords
We’ll focus on SEO a bit later – but right now it has to be said that website content should be just as much centered around the underlying message as around keywords. If you want your site to rank high on Google search results, you have to identify the phrases your potential clients are using while browsing the web. That’s how your website will get more traffic.
3. … but so is a user-centered design
There is a reason why User Experience has been the marketing world’s darling phrase for almost a decade. Focusing on the way a user perceives and experiences your website’s interface is key to success. Why?
- Because it’s the website’s design that guides users toward specific actions (like requesting a quote or adding more products to their carts) and underlines your core messaging.
- Because design serves a major branding role – with its colors, fonts, and even shapes that your interface takes, it can reinforce brand recognition and make it cohesive.
- Because users’ experience is one of the things that they’ll remember the most after leaving your company’s website. Especially if their experience was bad…
The website’s design speaks volumes about your business. That’s why you have to care about making navigation as easy as possible, loading times – no longer than three seconds and the layout as a whole – reflecting your brand’s personality.
4. Always keep SEO in mind
There’s much more to SEO than incorporating a bunch of phrases into a website’s content. As we said, if you want to gain traffic from Google, your website has to be optimized in line with algorithm preferences. That means:
- adding meta tags for every subpage;
- customizing pages’ URLs to be search-friendly;
- optimizing images to improve site speed;
- boosting the site’s authority by link building (generating quality backlinks from websites highly rated by Google’s algorithms)
and a lot more. Remember, organic search drives the absolute majority of business websites’ traffic.
Conclusion
Investing in a professional business website is a must. When done right, it enhances brand reputation, fosters user engagement, and drives sales. If that’s exactly what you aim for, choose the right CMS solution and prioritize user-centric design along with high-quality, SEO-optimized content. With the right approach, your website will soon become one of your most valuable business assets!
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