Business Creativity: How to Develop and Design a Successful Website

Building a website for your business will take more than registering a domain name and throwing up some sales information on a standard-issue template. If you want to compete with modern, web-friendly brands, you'll need to follow these steps to create a high-impact website for the 21st century.

Integrate Your Social Media Accounts

According to the Pew Research Center, 69 percent of adults use some form of social media. The greatest concentration of users is on Facebook, but Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn also boast millions of visitors. A successful business website will integrate these platforms to increase customer engagement with their brand. For example, you might create an icon tray of social media buttons that encourage users to "like this" or "pin this." You might also include pop-ups that ask users if they'd like to "share this with friends" whenever they purchase a product or sign up for a loyalty program. The more that you encourage word-of-mouth on social media networks, the more customers that you'll potentially reach.

Create an Engaging Site Design

Web design is about more than having an attractive layout. It also needs to be smart, intuitive, and user-friendly so that customers want to click around and spend time on your site. If you're running an e-commerce site, this means site navigation that clearly divides different product categories. If you're running something like a medical or legal website, you'll want the most relevant and up-to-date information at the top of the page and not the bottom. Think about issues like sidebars versus drop-down menus, and consider both the advantages and disadvantages of having a splash page. If needed, you might invest some time researching enterprise web development companies for some ideas to implement on your own site. You should also pay attention to things like color psychology and text readability. These small design elements can make a big difference in the overall success of your website.

Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing technique that can help you gain visibility on search engines like Google. Instead of being a useless result on page 30, you can use certain tips and tricks to become one of the first websites that customers see when they input specific search criteria. Keywords are the bread and butter of SEO, but there are also things that you can do with links, graphics, alt-text and that your content can be indexed to make your site friendlier to search engine algorithms. Another thing to consider is relevance or "authority." If a search engine considers you to be a reputable source, you'll climb in their results faster than unofficial or unfounded sources.

Use Analytics to Increase Web Traffic

The nitty-gritty details of your web traffic can be very important when building an advertising strategy. If you don't know who your customers are or where they're coming from, it's much harder to establish things like targeted marketing techniques for specific individuals and groups. Do yourself a favor and monitor the analytics of your website from the moment that it launches. Look for trends in user demographics that can help you nail down the ages, genders, locations and income levels of your biggest customers, and figure out where you're getting the most clicks and pingbacks to boost your ad revenue from those particular websites. Knowledge is power when it comes to web traffic, especially knowledge that's gained and analyzed over a long time period.

Creating a website for your business is different than running a blog for your personal amusement. Not only can your sales and profits depend on your web presence, but it can also make or break you in terms of brand awareness in the digital age. Use these tips to ensure that your website is well-crafted and well-worth the visit from potential customers.