A business website is one of the most important elements of branding and customer engagement tools available to you so it's important to get it right. Personally, I would never trust myself with such an important task, and would always leave it to a professional web design company. That being said, if you are determined to design a professional website yourself, here are some important elements to consider:
- Usability - your customers demand a highly usable website that doesn't cause them needless frustration. Commonly used buttons should appear bigger than other, less-important buttons. Making sure your website is highly usable for a good customer experience is a difficult task and best left to the professionals.
- Colour - certain colours are better at converting leads to sales than others. For example, it's been shown that a combination of red and yellow makes us hungry. Carefully consider the colour palette of your website.
- Responsive design - a huge portion of internet users browse on their phones. You can bet, then, that a lot of your website traffic will be from mobile devices. Make sure your website has utilised responsive design and looks good on every device.
- SEO - for your website to rank well in search engines, it needs to be designed using best SEO practices.
