No nation can ignore the role of small business in its economy. Therefore, improving small business performance through appropriate website design solutions proves high yielding endeavors. The current post is focusing on some vital aspect of the due course to guide small businesses and their web development teams.

U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has estimated that the small businesses have generated 64% new jobs since 1995 and paid nearly 44% of payroll of the nation.

The data confirm the significance of small businesses in the nation’s economy and growth.

By nature, small businesses are innovative and bring fresh air in the economy by creating unique jobs that traditionally minded enterprises hardly can. Therefore, anything matters more for small businesses leaves greater impacts on the economy, hence the market.

However, small businesses are suffering from several constraints to grow rapidly compared to enterprises or large organizations. Therefore, marketing agencies working for small businesses always take care of these constraints and come up with viable solutions.

For small business marketing, online presence is a more feasible option than building a mobile app. Thus, today we will look at the tips on website design that can contribute some to the betterment of small businesses.

Tip No.1 – Define the Purpose and Gather Information for Small Business Website Development

Some websites are informative only, some are pure eCommerce, some just showcase the business, some are helping internal and external staff to manage the business processes, and some are big portal harboring web applications and myriads of services to cover a diverse folk.

Therefore, if you are a small business, you must decide the type and aim of your website and start to gather the required information to provide your web development team. For instance, requirements of features and functionality, type of your targeted audience, the behavior of your audience, competitors and competition analysis, plans for growth and expansion.

The competition analysis may help you to find design and development trends prevailing in the market such as the layout of the website, color, style, UI elements, content architecture, content style, CTA, navigation schemes, typography, user experiences, and usability.

Another thing is a business analyst. If the web development team has a business analyst to gather and process the business needs in collaboration of the business side team and sometimes visiting business premises to run brainstorming sessions with the business staff or target audience.

Apart from such basic requirements, you must define the branding strategy and methodologies to amalgamate your branding campaign in the website development.

When the web development team is consisting of an experienced UX designer, it is advisable to run the guerilla UX research on the representatives of the target audience. It can give real insights of website requirements and its relevancy with defined purposes.

Tip No.2 – Look at Design Aspects of Small Business Website Development

Hiring an eminent team with high rates for the website development for small businesses is not a feasible option. Similarly, small businesses also wish to have somewhat high-end and high-quality website to sustain in the fiercely competitive market.

Therefore, Do-it-Yourself (DIY) tools are seldom working for them as it is good for startups but prove inadequate for SMBs. In due course, outsourcing the work at offshore places is the best and cost-effective way to obtain the best out of the budgeted expenses.

“Of course, outsourcing your project to Perception System like seasoned web development team devoted to small businesses in the USA may prove a wise decision.”

However, the following design considerations can help a lot to add values in the website design projects for the small businesses.

Take minimalistic design approaches to create a simple, functional, and elegant website.

Think of the mobile-first approaches and prefer to have responsive web design instead of a dedicated mobile website to create a mobile-friendly website. It is because the search engines only rank mobile-friendly websites in the SERPs.

Take the advantages of the advanced navigation schemes including off-canvas vertical navigation menus, breadcrumbs, layered navigation with attributes drop-down, faceted search, suggestive search, and autocomplete feature in the on-site search engine.

Embed multimedia content like audio and video to make your message more effective and easily consumable.

Use unique and relevant images to grab immediate attention of website visitors.

Optimize images, multimedia content, code, and interactions to make website loading as well as interactions fast.

Involve user experience designers in your small business web design team (If possible) to get the excellent user experience right from the designing.

Select the web designers in the team who have experiences in UI designing for the various mobile devices like smartphones and tablets to offer native mobile experiences including for touch gestures.

Use the latest and interactive wireframe and prototyping tools to simulate the real-life experiences and ease the design finalization process.

Designing and writing effective CTA is the best way to improve conversion rate.

Image optimization tools are now advanced enough to give high-quality throughputs with minimum KBs.

Tip No.3 – Look after Programming Aspects of Small Business Website Development

The first thing at programming front is the selection of programming technologies. It is true that open source programming languages or platforms are a great choice but always comes with some disadvantages, and it depends on your project to select those or not.

For instance, the WordPress is a great platform for CMS web development but coping with its frequent updates and extension proves daunting for a web developer when extensive customization is involved in the core code.

Similarly, Magento is king of eCommerce platforms, but for SMBs it proves a bit heavy to manage and run. Thus, choice of right programming technologies and tools make much sense for long-term considerations, and expert web consultants can provide righteous guidance in due course.

After selection of right programming technologies, tools, and expertise, small businesses must look at the quality of code for code clarity, comprehensiveness, and compactness. Applying the best coding practices prevailing in the industry is the answer.

If you use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript like scripts in your website programming, optimize it using various script optimization techniques and tools. Web programmers must know when to use inline scripts and when to rely on external files.

Using pre-built theme for website designing and development is a practical and time-saving idea. A lot of paid themes are available on each open source platform with customizing abilities is the choice of web developers.

Themes have tons of advantages against from the scratch web development so small businesses must use high quality and elegant themes to meet their budgetary constraints.

Another important aspect of small website design is testing for various parameters defined earlier in the planning phase. In some projects, it needs to carry on the completion of each important output/section while in many instances, after finishing programming phase.

Testing is either done manually or using automated tools. Testing assures the quality of deliverables and smooth functioning of the website. Bug-free and highly optimized websites for performance attract more business and resulting in high conversion.

It is imperative to have website mobile-friendly these days. Therefore, testing on real mobile devices on different OS and browsers is essential to grab and retain a vast audience present on the mobiles.

Looking for the latest location-based technologies and integration help small businesses to do local marketing efficiently. Similarly, integration of Artificial Intelligence technologies like Chatbot is an elegant solution to provide high-end support services.

Small business website development team should have knack and expertise for these upcoming technologies and guide clients to mingle it appropriately.

Tip No.4 – Look after Deployment and Marketing Aspects for Small Business Website Development

After designing, programming, and testing, the website becomes ready to deploy on the web and need special consideration for the deployment. The selection of right host is the first necessity for the successful deployment.

Today hosting providers offer web servers as well as cloud computing-based hosting services. Hosting packages involve shared, virtual private servers (VPS), and dedicated server hosting options for different hosting needs.

For small websites like personal blogs or the single page, websites are okay for the shared hosting. Some kinds of eCommerce and mid-size websites with some security concerns or performance concerns are good for VPS packages.

Big eCommerce sites and web portals with monetary transactions as well as flow of sensitive user data require dedicated hosting to meet security and performance aspects.

Fortunately, cloud hosting trends have made high-end hosting solutions cheaper and better, so it depends on the type and nature of your small business website as well as business niche to make a wise hosting selection.

Hosting solutions also demand the various features and hardware customization, and it is only possible with the help of the website developers who have created the website and know better that which hosting solution is feasible for the site in question.

Don’t refrain from taking help of your web development team to make hosting decision as well as carry out the website deployment process. After hosting, marketing, maintenance, and upgrade tasks are waiting for the web development team to make the website a success legend for the small business.

Sign up marketing, maintenance, and update contract with the same web development team who has developed your website. The best way is to sign such contracts right from the beginning of the web development project so web developers can take care of SEO aspects right from the designing and programming stages.

Maintenance and support contract is essential to assure smooth running and better growth of website and performance. Bugs occur seldom, but server related issues like crashes and performance glitches are frequent in the case of websites. Therefore, experienced and expert services are mandatory to deal with it effectively.

Conclusion:

The role of small businesses is significant in the national economy and prospective growth of society by-and-large. Therefore, everybody takes care of small businesses and their issues. The website is providing new ways of marketing and opportunities to do something innovative for the small businesses.

Therefore, focusing on web development can yield better results and help them a lot. In due course, the current post has provided some useful tips on research & planning, designing, programming, and deployment & marketing aspects.

However, such tips are never the perfect solution to achieve success in the niche market of the small businesses. They should have highly experienced, talented, and expert team with creative mindsets to bring optimize solutions considering various constraints in the development right from the beginning.

Fortunately, Perception System has provided highly acceptable and viable solutions for a range of small businesses to sustain and grow in the fiercely competitive market. Feel free to place your case on the table for brainstorming and fruitful conclusion to create an elegant website design solution by its website designing and development team .

Author Bio: Tarang Vyas, CTO at Perception System, a leading Website Design and Development Company, founded in 2001

4 Tips in Website Design That Small Businesses Need to Know