“Websites promote you 24/7: No employee will do that.” – Paul Cookson.

Reread these lines every time you’re dicey about building a business website for your brand.

Why?

From vegan soaps to purple ketchup, there’s a market out there for virtually every product and service you can think of. Digital customers know that they have to go online to find products and services that match their requirements.

But, with probably tens and hundreds of companies offering the same product, what’s the secret ingredient that can help your brand stand out?

You guessed it right! It’s your WEBSITE.

Your website opens the door to many opportunities, provides an excellent user experience, and can become a powerful marketing engine for generating leads for your business.

While building a website is no rocket science, you need to incorporate certain elements to provide an outstanding, engaging, and safe experience to your visitors.

In this article, we will discuss some tips to build a website that sells.

Ready?

Let’s get started!

6 Essential Considerations When Building your Business Website

Build a business website that creates a positive impression and forces your visitors to come back, again and again, using these six tips:

1.   Ensure compliance with data privacy laws

When living in what seems like a never-ending pandemic, data privacy and safety may be the last thing on your mind because you may have other important business operations to accomplish.

If so, don’t worry! You’re among thousands of business owners.

With 79% of customers apprehensive and worried about their data security and privacy, compliance with data privacy laws like California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) is one of the most crucial elements of your website building process.

If complying with these laws seems like swimming in a pool of alphabets, you should first understand the CPRA in-depth to ensure your website is compliant. The CPRA is a successor of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) with some additional business obligations.

Additionally, CPRA has come as a ray of light for consumers who fear sharing their personal information. Unlike CCPA, the CPRA gives customers full power to tell companies not to use or share their data.

When building your website, be mindful of the data you’re going to collect, have a privacy policy in place, and seek consent from your customers. Furthermore, it can give you a competitive edge over other brands as customers gravitate towards brands promising adequate privacy and safety of their information.

Pro-tip: Being compliant with privacy laws is no longer an option. It’s a necessity to avoid costly lawsuits.

2.   Concentrate your design on user experience

It may be tempting to create an interactive website to attract your potential customers. But, if it crashes on the first click and has a bounce rate higher than what you can imagine, what good is all the interactive features going to do?

You will simply lose website visitors who are less likely to return to your brand again.

That’s why it’s essential to stick to a user-friendly web design. Something that appeals to your customers while allowing them to navigate through your website seamlessly. More and more designers are turning to UX design tools to test and validate ideas and concepts to accomplish this design goal.

These tools help you understand the overall journey of your potential customers and turn it into a website that’s intuitive and functional. Making the experience of your website memorable is more important than words that your website conveys. Users tend to forget the key points mentioned on your webpage, but they remember their experience using your website and how it made them feel.

The graphic, interactive element, text, and layout of your website should work in synergy to present a memorable experience while conveying the required information.

Pro-tip: A design tool can help you strike emotional responses with visitors as it provides deep user insights using various methods.

3.   Use a simple web page layout

The layout of your website is another critical element to consider, and simplicity is the key to success. A simple layout gets rid of all the unnecessary design elements.

For example, if a customer visits your website to know your business email address or phone number, direct them to your ‘Contact Us’ page instead of making them read the ‘About Us’ section before displaying your contact page link. When your customers have to navigate a maze to find what they want, they won’t hang around for a long time.

So, it’s imperative to keep a clean layout, and you can ensure this by having a single definite goal for every web page. For example, your contact information page should give your contact details instead of sharing a product or service guide and contact information.

Pro-tip: Use whitespaces generously to enhance your website design and make it more appealing.

4.   Use the F-shape reading pattern

How do you read a fiction novel or an academic book?

You patiently go from one page to another, reading every word. But, when it comes to website content, your customers are not that patient. Instead, they scan through your pages to get a gist about you and your brand.

To overcome this content dilemma, focus on using the F-shaped pattern of structuring your web content. The F-pattern is a way your customer’s eye moves when they read your online content. Usually, your customers scan your web pages in this order:

• First, they see across the top of your page to read the headlines. This eye movement forms the top part of ‘ F.’
• Then, they move down to the left side to view your important bullet points or read your paragraph’s initial sentences. This forms the second horizontal line of ‘F.’
• Finally, their eyes move across your page to read your subheading or bolded text in the vertical direction.

Pro-tip: The F-shaped layout depicts the natural reading of people living in the Western part.

5.   Implement a content management system (CMS)

Using a CMS to power up your website is one of the leading ways to expand your digital presence and build a website that your customers love coming back to. You can create a new page or post with a few clicks. This encourages you to focus on your content while keeping your existing content updated.

Furthermore, a CMS adds a lot of functionality to your website. For example, it gives your customers the ability to search for content. As CMS stores all your data in a database, the search implementation becomes easy, enhancing your customer experience. Also, with a CMS in place, you can easily change your website design. This is because your content and design are a part of two separate virtual boxes, and change in your design doesn’t affect the functionality of your website.

Interestingly, it allows you to make changes to the administrative dashboard. As a result, the changes automatically propagate to your entire website, giving it a consistent appearance.

Pro-tip: Investment in a CMS platform is worth every penny as apart from the advantages mentioned above, it can also help you maintain your website.

6. Remember the SEO fundamental

In a quest to make your website appealing and attractive, businesses tend to overlook one of the most critical aspects of website building – search engine optimization (SEO).

When you build a website, you should know how search engines index and crawl your content. This ensures on-page SEO optimization for all your web pages. In addition, it can help you increase organic traffic and also improve your SERPs results.

Lack of on-page SEO could lead to your business losing opportunities to rank for search queries relevant to your products and services. Some other SEO elements include optimizing your HTML tags (meta, title, headers), headlines, and even images. It also means that your website should offer a high level of trustworthiness and expertise in your field.

Pro-tip: With on-page SEO optimization, you can win half of the battle as it helps you represent what your website is about.

Key takeaways

Developing and building a website is not a one-and-done deal. With hundreds of other brands racing to show on the first page of SERPs, it’s your stellar user experience mixed with a pinch of all the above six tips that can help your website stand out.

Merely providing a website interface is no longer going to help you. You need to connect with your customers. To build an emotional connection, focus on your UX design, use a simple web page layout, and give importance to customer’s data privacy. These are a few ways of turning your website into powerful lead generation magnets.

Apart from these six tips, you should also focus on your website load time because customers expect a site to load in less than 2 seconds! That’s the time you have to create an impression.

Also, give importance to mobile responsive design and incorporate a call-to-action (CTA) on every web page to motivate your visitors to take some action.

Your website can breathe a new life into your business!

Which of these six tips are you planning to use when building your website?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!