By now, everyone should know about the importance of establishing your business online. Whether you are a traditional offline business, a multimedia direct response business or a dedicated online business, establishing an online presence is a must. Many businesses, however, still haven’t embraced just how vital of a role website design plays as far as their business presence is concerned.
When most people think about website design, they inherently associate the idea with graphics, colors, images, layouts and so on. But an effective website design is much more than “visual”. Of course, the visual design elements of your design are critical, however, there are equally (if not more) important invisible design elements. The most critical of them is on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
You website design must take into account the primary goal: to promote your business in the most effect manner possible. This means making sure that your design is not just SEO-friendly, but absolutely SEO optimized in every way, shape and form. Why bother publishing a site on the Internet without optimizing it for search engines? Isn’t being discovered the entire purpose of being on the Internet in the first place? Or course it is. So make sure you have your priorities in order: traffic is the first and foremost concern. In order to get the most traffic possible, your website needs to be optimized accordingly.
There are many different approaches if you’re interested in a SEO-optimized website. However, probably the simplest and easiest way is to convert your site into a Wordpress blog. Blogs don’t have to “look” like blogs. You can still maintain a very business-like interface built on top of a blog, but the underlying blog infrastructure will greatly benefit your goal of generating more traffic. The biggest benefit to using a blog is that there are tons of tools and plugins out there (most of them free) that are meant to optimize your blog as well as to improve and enhance it with lots of features that you would otherwise have to pay a lot of money for.
Infrastructure is just one website design element: there are others that need to be considered as well. The internal structure of the website (everything from navigation to consistency) has a great deal of impact as well. The most important thing is answering this one simple question. What is the purpose of your site? This question may seem overly simplistic, but most business sites fail to address it. Their site becomes a “conglomeration of stuff”, a collection of ideas without a congruent message. Many times, as a business grows, their site grows out of control. Website design is not stagnant – it is a process – one that must be revisited as your business grows. It is often wise to break your site into many smaller sites, each with its own specific business model.
Remember: your website design is the key to the success of your online business presence, how you put yourself out there is vital. Don’t fall into the trap of just “having a site”. If you’re going to publish one, make it the best tool for your business that it can be.
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