Building a Solid Small Business Website

I think we are all aware that businesses built on a solid foundation will stand a much greater chance of being successful and growing. I suppose it is a bit like a house the deeper you build the foundations the higher you can build the house and the longer it will last. The same can be said for your website.

If you are designing or redesigning your website it is important to get organised before you start so that you can plan everything properly. Think about each web page, what it is going to convey to your visitor and also its ultimate goal, to achieve more conversions.

You should initially think about your main topics and make these your main navigation pages. You should then be able to put the rest of your content into sup topics under these main topics you have decided on. Remember to start with your research and then to begin organising.

Research

Before you begin anything, think about your business and do your research to decide on your topic areas. The first thing you should consider is the services you offer that are most important to your business. These should then be put into your navigation so that the most important is the most obvious. This will help to draw people to your major services first. Sounds obvious, but you would be amazed at how many website owners hide the most important information.

Secondly you should look at keyword research and consider some demographic targeting to decide on your other topic areas. This will give you a good idea of what you want to appear at the top of the search engines for and what will give you the greatest conversion rate. Adding these topic areas will show the search engines what you do and will also provide your potential clients with useful information, which if structured correctly will result in a higher conversion rate.

Organisation

So now you have done your research and decided on your main topics you need to organise all of the information you have. This will mean deciding on all of your sub topics and which topic they will go under.

It is important to remember that you want to keep you navigation as simple as possible and it is not essential that every page links to every other page in your website. Once you have decided on your topics then a user can visit that topic and explore it. A bit like a mini-site. Although they will be able to get to other topics they will not be bothered with the details of each topic unless they want to be.

So once you have your main navigation sorted it is a good idea to work on a secondary navigation system for your sub topics. This can be in the form of drop downs, if you have your navigation across the top of your website, of fly outs if it is down the side. However this type of navigation can get messy, especially if you have a lot of sub-topics.

A good way to set up your secondary navigation is to have your main navigation across the top. Then when someone selects a main topic another navigation bar will appear on the side giving a list of all the sub-topics. This will allow people to navigate around the details of the topic in, as mentioned before, a mini-site.

Other important things to remember is to include a call to action on each page and to allow people to either contact you or to book your services from each section and each page. This should help you to increase your conversion rate.

Conclusion

The most important thing for your website is that you plan it properly and keep everything as organised as possible. This is something you can do on your own before you bring in a design firm or you can do it alongside your design firm and get the advice from them as well.

Remember plan, plan and plan again.

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