There are few things as essential as setting up a good website when starting a business. A great website will draw in customers and collaborators, help you communicate with your market, and broadcast your mission to the public. Here are four things you should consider when setting up a new website for your business.
Invest In Translation
If you want your website to have a global reach, you will have to invest in a translation management system from Smartling. Modern translation management systems utilize complex software that assesses the context of your sentences before doing a translation. This vast improvement on older systems that translated each word often leads to clunky or inappropriately translated texts.
SEO Is Your Friend
Search Engine Optimization is the practice of ensuring that your website receives hits by being a top search result. The manipulation of search engine algorithms is essential if you want your business’ website to stand out from the crowd.
Third-party SEO companies offer optimization services to start-ups, usually employing freelance writers to produce content that helps to push your website to the top of search engine result lists.
Search Engine Optimization is one of the internet’s hidden processes that can work in the shadows – helping your website get more traffic.
Keep It Simple
Keeping your website design simple is very important. Those of us of a certain age will remember the early internet’s design conventions: spinning images, contrasting colors, and Times New Roman walls of text. Let’s never go back there. Keeping a site simple and easily digestible will make it far easier for visitors to get to where you want them to go.
Don’t offer too many drop-down menus, site options, or media players. You need to pare down your website to the essentials. Aesthetically, try and keep the page uncluttered and consistent. A neutral font like Helvetica or Ebrima helps the content of your text stand out. Avoid Comic Sans, obviously.
Create An Integrated Network
Likely, you have already set up social media profiles for your start-up. If you haven’t, why not? Social media platforms are essential for communicating with potential customers and collaborators, marketing, and data collection. One problem that can arise when using social networking sites for business is that it creates an extensive and unconnected presence online.
Using your website as a central hub for your social platforms can help solve this problem. By linking all social media accounts to your websites – and vice versa – you are presenting a coordinated front. Making sure that aesthetic and linguistic design principles are followed cohesively across all platforms amplifies this integrated feel. Your website and social media presence should be crafted in collaboration with your marketing department and regularly updated together at the same time.
Social media management tools can help small business owners coordinate their online presence without hiring a third-party agency.
