With the vast move to digital marketing and online business over the past several years, it has become imperative for every business to have a website. When constructing a business site, it’s important to think of the web design basics that will be most useful to customers. Here are four of the top functions and features that every business website should have in order to appeal to and attract customers.
Pricing Pages
Whether your business is a service provider, an e-commerce store or a local restaurant, it’s essential for the prices of your goods or services to be easily accessible on your site. If customers don’t know the cost of what you’re selling, they are likely to go to a competitive site that tells them what they can expect to spend.
If you do have competitors and your prices are lower, however, then you might want to include comparison prices on your site as well. If something is $39.99, for example, you could say something like “Compared to $49.99, as sold by our competitors”. It probably wouldn’t be the best of ideas to include the actual name of your competitor(s). Likewise, if something is on sale, you should tell visitors to your site the comparison price as well.
Contact Form
All business websites should have an integrated contact form that can be used to contact their owners directly via email. If your business has the resources necessary to do it, you might also consider enabling live chat support on your site. The easier you make it for a customer to get in touch with you, the more likely you are to drive customer engagement.
However, have you ever gone to a website, put something in the contact form, and never heard back from the site? This is a common occurrence and either happens from site manager negligence or a glitch in the website not connecting your email to the site. To help prevent that, make sure to give visitors to your site the option of using the contact form but also to your exact email address.
Location Page
One of the biggest mistakes a brick-and-mortar business can make on its website is to not add a location page. This page will tell prospective customers where they can find your business. This kind of page is especially important if your business is based in a large city. Discount Tire Centers is a great example of why it is necessary to have a location page. If you operated a shop like that, for example, it would be essential for your site to list your store’s location. Not only will not having such a page make it harder for customers to find your location, but the page itself also offers good opportunities for localized SEO keyword integration.
Good Site Organization
Though not a feature in itself, the organization of a website is key to its success with customers who visit it. If your site is poorly laid out and visitors have a hard time finding what they’re looking for, your conversion rates will probably be fairly low. If, on the other hand, you have a site with intuitive organization and easy search functionality, your conversion rates should be much higher.
In a way, building a great business website is as much an art as a science. Ensuring that your site users have a great experience should be your number one priority. Using these web design basics will get your site started, but if you want deeper insights into web design, you can also consult professional designers who can offer personalized advice for your business website.