Website Design

Features Your Small Business Website Needs Before Launching

Website guides offer you a list of ten to fifteen features to implement in your website and expect you to follow the checklist. Unfortunately, this recommendation doesn’t suit a small company with limited finances. While some of the mentioned features are really important, most of them are not crucial at the beginning of your project.

It’s crucial to start with fixing those problems that prevent the visitor from becoming your client. For example, a page that loads slowly, a navigation menu where your contact details are hidden and a text that describes your company instead of its benefits – it’s better to solve these issues before doing anything else.

In case of your website, it’s essential to consider mobile users who represent more than 50% of UK internet users nowadays. Moreover, Google checks the mobile version of your website first. Thus, if you started working on it on the basis of a computer screen, it would be wrong. You should start developing a mobile-friendly website and then optimize it for computers.

Your website contact page should include your email, phone number and your physical address if it’s available. It’s dangerous to use contact forms that don’t direct to any particular email address – a person who filled it should receive a response in a day after submission. Otherwise, it’s better to move your phone number to a more visible place and use the contact form only as additional communication channel.

And here are the features that can be ignored:

Blogging is important to improve search ranking but only if your service pages are ready first.
Chat is useless unless there is a person to answer questions.
Languages – add multiple languages only if your clients ask for it, not because your competitors do it.

The cost varies greatly depending on the website type you are creating – a one-page website will cost you much less than a site with e-commerce or any special functionality.

A website’s goal isn’t making it look attractive but answering three questions that a visitor always has: what is your service, whether it is relevant to his needs and what should he do next.