Fire Up An Effective Yet Affordable Website

Your website is your online storefront, whether you are selling tangible products, or whether your business is more service-based.

It's the place your customers come to find out who you are, what you do, and how you can benefit them.

As such it needs to be appealing, informative, easy to navigate and designed to keep your customers engaged.  It's clear that your business needs a website, and keeping it both customer and budget friendly may be easier than you think.

Start with these four top tips to help you create a viable website for your business….

Consider the DIY Option

Going DIY on your website design is the cheaper option as you won't be paying a web designer. Building your site yourself does cost you time, but with the web design tools available today it is worth considering.

Many web hosts come with builders that make it easy to put together a professional website; from web hosts with easy design tools such as Weebly or GoDaddy, to user friendly content management systems such as WordPress or Joomla, there is a tool out there to help you, with no need for coding or programming experience. 

Keep It Customer Friendly  

Making a savings on your website won't help your business if it doesn't do what you need it to do - attract customers and encourage sales. Make sure you follow these principles:

• Keep it engaging - Your site should say exactly what it needs to say, in a way that is interesting and speaks directly to what your customers need and want;
• Keep it useable - Your website needs to be easy to navigate with relevant information clearly displayed. Contacting you should be as easy as a click, and your site should display well on different devices and screen sizes;
• Keep it dynamic - Include regular news or a blog, high quality pictures or other multimedia, and customer reviews to keep your content interesting.</li>

Keep It Search Engine Friendly

To be successful, your website needs to be found, and this is where SEO (search engine optimization) comes in.

Get started by paying attention to these key areas:

• Make it indexable - Search engines don't index flash, java or images the same way they do text, so keep your most important content in HTML text format;
• Make your keywords count - Use relevant keywords in a natural and readable way that has the words a search engine needs but is human friendly;
• Make it fresh - Search engines don't like duplicated, irrelevant or out of date content. Regularly updated and relevant content will please both search engines and your readers.

Keep an Eye on Your Budget

As the article "4 Life Hacks to Track Spending" points out, lots of smaller outgoings can quickly add up to a less than healthy budget.

When it comes to building your website, it's important to set a budget and track it carefully to ensure your spending doesn't get out of control.

Prioritize where you really want to spend money where your website is concerned, and where a free or low cost option would be better.

Many CMS systems and page builders are free, and there are several low cost web hosts and domain registrars. Do some research into customer satisfaction and costs so you can compare and find the best option for your business.

Your business website is an important and powerful tool, worth taking the time to research and put together carefully, but it doesn't have to be costly or stressful. 

The resources are at your fingertips to get started on building a budget friendly and effective website today.