Effective small business web design means business
Effective small business web design is now critical to almost every small business. In fact, until you have your own business website, most potential customers won’t see you as a credible business at all.
Why is that? What makes a business website so special?
Small Business Web Design Matters
Your website is a key marketing vehicle for your business. It isn’t just a shop window. It’s an international travelling sales team, with the ability to sell 24/7/365 to customers in their own homes in the moments when they are most interested in buying.
Think about what it would cost to achieve that coverage with a team of salespeople. That’s the value a website provides. On top of that, each free visitor it attracts typically saves £1 or more in advertising costs. That’s why even established high-street shops often struggle to compete without an effective online presence.
Still, “effective” is the critical word here. Just any old website won’t do.
How Is Small Business Web Design Different?
Whatever your business sells or provides, marketing is what makes it a business. Marketing encompasses all the processes that lead to sales, so like it or not, marketing is the competition every business is in.
Providing great products and services matters, but you can’t just do that and hope they will sell themselves. “Hope marketing” just doesn’t work. Small businesses often struggle because they try to deny or ignore that.
So, small business websites need to compete effectively. Still, don’t all websites do that?
No. In fact, most don’t!
Business Websites Are Not Personal Websites
Many small business websites are built as though they were personal projects, or by people who have only ever built personal projects. Competing in search engines and converting visitors into customers simply aren’t priorities for such sites.
So building personal sites isn’t much help when it comes to designing business websites. Using drag’n’drop editors and relying on having an “eye for design” or being “artistic” doesn’t teach design or coding at all. That sort of free expression is art. Design is not art — design uses structure to solve problems and make things work.
In other words, going from building personal sites to building business websites is like learning bricklaying and then claiming to be an architect.
Common Small Business Web Design Mistakes
Cutting costs the wrong way on small business web design cuts profits
Many small business startups claim to follow a “lean startup” mentality. That’s fine if done properly, but is often just an excuse for doing as little as possible as cheaply as possible — and pretending that has a chance of working. That misses four vital points.
- Cutting investments as if they’re costs is often fatal. It’s the perfect example of a false economy. Unlike pure costs, sound investments pay for themselves and generate returns proportional to your investment. Whilst all investments involve risk, investing too little just increases the cost of failure.
- Investments offering 10x (or more) ROI are exceptional. So be ready to invest at least £2.4k a year (£200 per month) into promoting your business. Otherwise, you may struggle to make the UK Minimum Wage of £24k. As a critical foundation for those marketing efforts, your website’s quality will affect your entire business.
- No race was ever won by just copying competitors and tagging along with the pack. Established firms have advantages over startups, who first need to catch up with the pack. Either way, you’ll need to work smarter and/or harder than your competitors to stand out. The skills needed to work smarter often take years to learn. That is why people invest in experienced web design and digital marketing help.
- Starting with a “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP) to test your market isn’t a valid test unless you reach the market. So trying that with ineffective marketing just wastes your entire budget and cripples your dream.
So underinvesting in marketing doesn’t reduce risk. It increases risk and reduces returns.
Why DIY And Most Cheap Web Design Services Fail
Whilst DIY website builder platforms claim you can have a “professional” website without skill, time or money, that’s just a sales pitch. If it were true, most professional web designers would be using them. Most of us don’t, because they’re limiting. We prefer to keep building sites that out-compete what those platforms can achieve. That’s what serious businesses — like the ones you need to compete with — pay us to do.
Likewise, for various reasons, most cheap web designers disappear. Few stay in business long enough to gain useful business experience, let alone provide support when you need it. Don’t underestimate how much that can cripple your business. You will need ongoing support — because the web evolves rapidly.
In other words, the hidden costs of cheap web design are generally more expensive than investing in better solutions.
So What Do You Really Need?
Your website is a business-critical investment. Your profits — and maybe even the survival of your business — will depend on you investing in the most cost-effective solution you can afford. Because “cost-effective” always beats “cheap”.
Still, having specialised in helping small firms since 2005, I appreciate that budgets often limit the best of intentions. So I’ve developed a range of small business web design solutions to maximise your returns on what you’re able to invest:
- Professional web design — including website redesigns, bespoke web development and other unique projects
- Affordable small business web design packages — perfect for most startups, sole traders and other micro businesses
- Budget web design, basic websites and one-page websites — just the essentials for those on very tight budgets