There are three things I believe are a great thing to do for many small business websites. Some analysis on these things will be released by us in the coming months but for now here are 3 amazing techniques for making every small business website an effective one.

1. The Heading – Stop Them Skimming And Start Them Reading
If possible please try to avoid annoying and boring titles. You will never see a newspaper article with a monotonous headline. Journalists take it pretty seriously; they know how important the headline is. Never have a heading that is not effective enough to attract people.
Website owners normally seem to think a heading of ‘Welcome to [business name goes here]‘ is sufficient. We really encourage small business owners to have a heading that engages people right from the beginning. Ask a question or state what makes you unique, or say something surprising or interesting.
You will need to be a little ingenious while also thinking about the time period for which this title could last and be beneficial. See our primary site for an example http://www.webcircle.com.au/. Our heading (at the time of writing) is “Web Circle is a progressive agency with a relentless drive to discover and implement what works on the web. But what does work?” It notifies people what we do, it will give a hint to our point of difference and it asks a query to engage the viewer and draw them towards the main content in the website – all in just 2 sentences – stop them skimming and start them reading and that way they might stay in your site for a long time to actually learn what you do and find out that you may be an apt choice for whatever they are looking out for.
2. The welcome message -
There are many ways for doing this. You may not have a lengthy welcome message – for instance in our case we have a heading that includes the fundamentals of the welcome message and after that we have the about us section further down. You may consider it’s suitable to have a more in depth welcome message. If you do, don’t forget to tell people the essentials of what you do, perhaps where you are located but do not stop there. There are 2 other things you have to include:
1) What is it that makes you different
2) A call to action
Firstly what makes you different – your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), competitive benefit or several other consultant buzzwords. It is significant to say what you do – i.e. you sell widgets but it’s as important perhaps a lot more important to talk about how you are different in ways that will engage prospective viewers. Most people who look around for widget selling companies will land on your site as a result. They would know completely well that you sell Widgets. But what is it about your business that will keep them on your website and think ‘yeah these guys sound really good’. This could be done in different ways, you will possibly know from your customers or from the reasons you started your business in the first place exactly what you do really well and why your business is a success. This is just what you need in here. Just stating how you are different, ideally, in a way that will draw in the people you are trying to target is the key. You can some times discuss your the past, your people, personal reviews, everything that you think can add credibility in the eyes of your clients, any achievements, testimonials and anything that adds to your point of difference and builds the dependability of your business.
We (http://www.webcircle.com.au/) make use of the words ‘what actually works on the web’. We have a tendency to talk about “building websites that work” simply because we are specialists in knowing what works. We do not just build websites.
Secondly, a call to action is imperative. What do you want them to do? Be sure to guide the visitor as to where they have to go next. It might be to contact you, to download something, to buy something. It can be anything But Make It Clear. The last thing you want is an attracted visitor bouncing to a different site because they have given up trying to work out how they can take the next step. I’ve done it plenty of times, there is only so much patience a person can have so make it easy.
3. Personalisation
Personalisation is extreamly important for small business. When you are thinking on the lines of exactly what makes your business different a lot of small businesses will find that it is you that make the business one of a kind. It is the personal relationship they have with their customers. It is their story, their history, their unique blend of skills. This is why we give more importance to personalising a small business as much as possible.
This is very efficient mainly for the types of businesses that have a lot of in-person contact with their clients. People tend to give positive responce to personal messages with real photo. People love stories – they love success stories and small businesses love working with other small businesses.
We recently updated our homepage with a few changes, I put my photo on the homepage and changed the ‘about us’ section to ‘The web circle story’. I also wrote half of the story on the homepage, despite that I looked at the stats after a few weeks and found that lot of people had visited the page and they were spending almost 3 times as long as the page – implying they were actually reading it not just clicking on it and skimming it and passing it off as another ‘about us’ page.
And that’s for my not so interesting web design business! Think if my story was indeed exciting! This is an easy way for separating yourself from other challengers because the majority people don’t achieve it – in fact a group of small businesses deliberately try to make themselves appear bigger than they truly are no matter what the reason might be.
Bringing it all as one
We newly designed a site for Act2 Solutions who retail Actuarial Certificates. Read this post for some information on the site. It includes a catchy caption that states exactly what they do (and how they are different – they are inexpensive), a welcome note that focuses on how they are unique, personalisation by using pictures of Andy as well as a call to action telling traffic to download the forms.
Please feel free to post any comments or examples of sites you come up with plus your experiences with some of these thoughts.
AWebsiteDesigner.com.au is a company specialising in small business websites. We have been established for 5 years. A Website Designer website which was previously the main website for another web design company. Since then the website has been a leading blog and resource for Australian small business owners. Visit http://awebsitedesigner.com.au to learn more about web design.
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