The business website is where you plant the flag of your company online. It’s how a lot of your customers are going to first find you, and where even more will go to find out more. So you need to make sure that it’s doing its job. Not just looking pretty, but giving them all the utility and accessibility they need. Here’s how you should consider getting more from your business site.

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Avoiding the cowboys

Website design is a practice that has literally thousands of practitioners. Nowadays, it can easy to find yourself with a designer who simply doesn’t have the skills to incorporate what you want. By the time you realise this, you’ve already paid for a site that could do your brand more harm than good. Be careful with your outsourcing from the get-go. Use resources that can point you in the right direction of the top web designers. Get a look at their past work, as well as getting in contact with previous clients. Don’t trust anyone blindly.

Plan out your sitemap

From the very start, you need to think about what’s going to be on your site. Think about the different pages and what they’re going to offer. How do people get from one page to another? Could a page better fit as a subcategory within another? An easy-to-use sitemap, one that can be used intuitively, is vital if you want visitors to have an easy trip through your site.

Keep it accessible

It’s not only important to consider how easy it is to navigate the site using the site map. It’s also about making it more accessible to as many different kinds of customers as possible. For example, think of how many mobile internet users there are these days. If it’s not accessible to them, you could be missing a big chunk of visitors you might otherwise retain.

Think about what it’s for

What does your website do? Is it an ecommerce site? Is it there to market your business or inform customers? Is it a branding tool? Whatever your answer is, that’s where you need to begin when you decide on the different uses it can offer customers. It could be a place that makes purchasing much quicker. It could provide online quote services. It could be a place where you can store great content marketing. The point is that you need to have a motive behind what you put on the site.

Support is essential

When people have a question, the website is likely to be one of the first places they go. Are you prepared to be able to provide those answers? There are all kinds of different support methods you can offer. The important part is that they’re easy to access. If you have a ‘contact us’ page, make it easily accessible anywhere on the site. Similarly, if you’re using on-site chat help, make it a pop-up at the bottom of the browser the user can open it at any time.

Getting noticed

Once you have your site up and running, the next step is to get people to start visiting it. Inbound and outbound marketing are both important. Inbound marketing is how you use tools like search engine optimisation so that it’s easier for potential customers to find you. Outbound is using your social media and other marketing materials to redirect them to the site. Just make sure that you use landing pages for outbound marketing. You need to be directing visitors to where they specifically need to go, not just your front page.