Web design on a budget: what are the must haves for your website?
Websites are so important now, they are rather an essential piece to have as part of either a business, offering service, or needing to publicise yourself. The only problem is that custom websites can be expensive, so here’s some tips to help you have the best website design you can on a budget.
Good Hosting
It is so important to have good website hosting as this is where your website is coming from. If your hosting isn’t good, your website will keep dropping out, be very slow, or have other problems. This then
affects the bounce rate of your website as people will visit and leave straight away, affecting you as you can get bad reviews making your business or service untrustworthy. You can also have issues when you need to fix the problems and they have bag customer services.
Therefore, you want to do some research and shop around to get the best one for you. You want one that will have a server that should provide your website with a 99% uptime guarantee. As well as having excellent customer service with a reliable tech support with immediate response time. This means that if you do have any problems, they will be dealt with quickly and won’t cause other problems. The most popular web-hosting companies can be quite pricey but there are smaller companies that offer just as good of quality services.
Captivating Home Page
Your homepage is the first thing people see when they go on your website, therefore you want to make a good first impression. With visitors who are coming on your website for the first time, they are going to want to look around. Having a design that looks professional and brand related will make it easier for your visitors to navigate your website to find what they are after, whilst making them feel safe on your website. This is especially important if you are selling stuff on your site, as it will result in more transitions.
User Friendly Design
Having a design that is user friendly is going to keep your visitors on your site, and make them more likely to consider you for what they are looking for. Your website should be neatly organized and easy to navigate, which makes it easier for visitors to delve in deeper to your site and follow what your website is trying to get across to them.
Comprehensive About Page
This page is important to your visitors because it gives them some information about your business. You do have to be careful when doing this page as some companies don’t put enough information on this page and others put too much information on. Therefore, you want to simply explain your business and what you offer, in a concise and captivating manner.
WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast
WordPress has lots of free plugins that you can use on your website however one of the best ones to have is the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast. This plugin incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between. Using this plugin to help make your website as optimized as possible, will help to improve your website’s search engine rankings, meaning more visitors to your site.
Interesting, Useful and Active Blog
The reason having a blog on your website is so useful is because it creates more leads for potential visitors to your website. Posting content that is both informative and interesting will attract more visitors and lead them to connect with the site. This can be from commenting on the post, sharing it to other people, or even considering using your services. Although having a blog is good, it is best if it is active, this means you have to post regularly. By doing this the search engines will see that there is fresh content, and shows your website is active, therefore helping your search engine ranking.
Call to Action on Your Home Page
A call to action helps bring attention to what you want your visitors to do on your website, whether this is to sign up to your mailing list or contact you. This is a simple technique that helps your visitors find these features easily and encourages them to do something on your website, creating a connection to your company.
Emphasize Your Contact Information
This is an important thing to do as you do not want to make your visitors search around to contact you, as some will give up if it is not easy and others will think this company doesn’t want to be contacted, therefore this will lose you customers. Like above you can emphasize your contact information with a call to action, you want it to be easy for them to contact you. You should try and link any way they can contact you, whether this is through a form on your site, your phone number, your email, or your social media accounts.
Collect Testimonials
Collecting testimonials from previous clients and really help to reassure your potential clients that they should choose you over other businesses in the same industry. This is a great way to advertise your business while gaining a good reputation.
Conclusion
There are so many ways to create an amazing website on a budget. Just think about your priorities and consider looking into free options too. For example WordPress is an open source platform (free) and has a bunch of free additions and plugins, so definitely look around.
