• Web Design

How to Choose the Best Website Template for Your Small Business

How your website looks and interacts with surfers is the first battle to online success.

Your small business needs to be first recognized and easy to navigate so that customers and potential customers don’t feel overwhelmed with confusion regarding your products and services. That being said, choosing the best website template for your small business is paramount.

First of all, ask yourself what is your business about and what does it project? If you have a surfing company featuring the latest boards and gear then a template that expresses that is in order. One that allows for images of the ocean, perhaps photo graphics or cartoon graphics of surfers in prominent yet non obstructive position. Should your company be about Italian cuisine then a red/white/green motif with a picture of the Italian peninsula could be incorporated. Remember, when a person sees your website the image must impinge without disturbing or overwhelming the surfer. You want something attractive that establishes what the site is about and is easy to recall. Doing things right from the start like at Pop Paddleboards means you’ll have an easier task down the road.

Next, the template has to be functional across the board. It has to have the proper menu options so that surfers can gather more data about your business. A clear layout with a strong header graphic establishing your brand as well as smaller graphics that point to areas of the site you want the surfer to go to. The template should have the inner pages equally well designed and easy to link to the main page and additional data. Confusing menu options such as elaborate buttons and bars burns up valuable time for the surfer and can cause them to leave. You don’t want that. You want to capture and convert to sales and then after delivering the service you want the customer to boast how good you are via social networking.

That brings us now to using social networking in the template. Today’s templates have built in social networking options. A train car of the most popular sites have graphics that you can strategically place throughout the site via the template. This allows for surfers to recommend and comment on your goods and services and get sharing as well. You might want a template that allows for a gallery of your goods, services, staff. These pictures can then be shared via Facebook and other networks thus adding to more notoriety and targeted traffic.

The wizardry of today’s template designers and the ever changing technologies means your template should be adaptive to these changes. This means that three months from now should a major change occur in interaction via the web you should be able to modify your template or get an update from the creator. Just ask around at USA Billa to see how things should be done. These template sites have free and commercial templates. One has to be cautious here because free may or not mean good. Pay may fall into this as well. Look over the template site or the creator of the template and surf the web for recommendations and kudos regarding them. They may have fan clubs or social networking fan pages devoted to them. This means that they’ll do the best job to keep their reputation high.

Remember, this is for your small business. You don’t want to overdo it but you don’t want to look amateurish either. Looking generic will bring you generic results. Look at a template and see how much of it can be modified easily. A trick here is to have your own brand graphics made and incorporate it into the template. This will make your use of the template more unique and stand out among the rest of the sites that use the same one. It’s tricks like this that should be included in your choice in choosing the best template for your small business.

Finally, after reviewing what the template looks like, it’s options and properties as well as your intentions, how will the template perform? Having statistics for your site is important and more so if you run a small business. Some templates might have stats friendly engineering incorporated. There’s no telling nowadays with website templates because the technologies keep advancing. One month a template might be able to allow for simple video and a month later you can find it allows for 3D or whatever the geniuses come up with nowadays.

So think it out first and follow the basic guidelines of what a small business would need to choose the best website template and you should be good to go.

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Author’s Bio:

Jenny Corteza is an avid surfer and DIY robots builder. She is currently engaged in the seasteading project to gain momentum in a fight to make free, empowered living possible for anyone.