Beginners Luck: Designing Your Own Site as a Home Based Business Owner
Creating a well-designed website can take a lot of time, money and effort for small and large businesses alike. After all, a good website isn’t just about slapping together some flashy graphics and cool colors. Most companies have their own division that works on the development and on-going maintenance of a site. If you’re an average home-based business owner, however, you most likely will have to do all of the designing, maintaining and analyzing yourself all while keeping costs low. So, how can your site compete with those created by professionals? It doesn’t have to, but there are some unique challenges that you might face.
Building trust
The biggest benefit of a running your business from home is also one of its biggest detriments: there’s no physical location your customers can visit. They can’t actually inspect your product in person nor are they guaranteed that an order they place will actually arrive. While an increased amount of consumers are making their purchases online, 94 percent of Americans do not trust the Internet. This means building trust is essential to acquiring and retaining visitors.
Since you don’t have a physical address, you will need to depend on other means to improve your credibility. One of the best ways to do this is through user-generated content. Allow customers to leave reviews on your product or service. Not only does it show visitors that people are actually making purchases, but it also gives them first-hand accounts on your offerings. As well, make sure it is easy for users to share your pages through social media as 70 percent of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family.
Developing your site
Even if you don’t have a team working on your site, you can still create one that appeals to customers. In fact, with the popularity of services like WordPress and the abundance of cheap or free themes, you don’t even need to know any coding. When choosing the proper template for your site, keep in mind the image you want to portray as well as the habits of your customers. You can test out different templates and track your conversions rates to find the best one. When setting up your site, make sure that you clearly mark your navigational buttons and that your landing page clearly explains, in a few words and images, what your visitors will get out of your site. Keep your site as simple as possible without leaving out any of the important details. Be sure to include plenty of visuals that emphasize certain points or show visitors different views of your product.
While there are some expensive tools to analyze your site, you can find some for cheap or free that will show you exactly where your visitors are clicking, where they are leaving in the conversion process and even what pages are loading slowly. Adjust your site as necessary or look for templates that match up with the data.
Most of all, be true to yourself and your company. As a home business, you have more freedom to experiment with your style and find a design that aligns with your vision.
Hitting publish
Designing an eye-catching site doesn’t require a lot of money or people, but it will require plenty of long hours and hard work. As a home based business you might face some challenges other brick-and-mortar companies do not, but you have the advantage of appealing to a smaller, more devout audience and the freedom to let your personality shine through your web design.
Author Bio: Owen Andrew is a tech journalist and enthusiast. He enjoys writing about social media for business, cloud computing, eCommece, website design and migration, and home business optimization. He frequently contributes to the TollFreeForwarding.com blog as a tech specialist. He hopes you enjoy this article and thanks Design Float for having him.
