Checklist for Your Startup Business Website
When your company is young, it has to take advantage of every possible channel where it can reach its potential target market. Creating a website is a must-have for startups.
An ideal start-up business website goes beyond its aesthetics. It’s more than just building a presence in the World Wide Web. The goal is for a website to build a better brand, expand your market reach and most of all, grow your RoI.
Start with the basics. You need a logo that resonates your brand as well as graphics and colors that correlate the company’s message. Your website should have powerful call-to-action and easy-to-see search field.
As a startup, you want people to know about the latest updates on your company so having a news or blog area is also important. If you are targeting multiple countries, you may also add language-switching option.
As people use various device types when they are on the Internet, you should make sure your website is compatible to all devices. Although 91% of searches happen on laptop and PCs, Smartphones accommodate some 80% searches in daily bases and tablets of 47%.
Your website should also be compatible with major browsers like Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet explorers. Site speed is very essential. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, you will lost 40% of your potential visitors.
You might probably already heard that content is the king, and that is an undying truth when it comes to an Internet presence. Outstanding content is the lifeline of your website. Mediocre contents and grammatical errors will not only hurt your Internet presence but so to overall business credibility.
Take security SERIOUSLY. The numbers of online breaches are overwhelming and scary most specially for businesses. Make sure you’re site is running in secure host and server. Everything should be backup in case of data lost. Your site’s login system must be secured. Don’t share login info with unwanted parties and your site’s login pages should be fully encrypted.
A 404 Page is a crucial part of a business website. It is inevitable that a page could be wiped out or relocated and when a website visitor goes to this particular link, it will display an Error 404 Page which makes website visitor unhappy.
What you can do is supply the reader enough details as to what happened to that page and provide search box or navigation menu where the user himself can find a specific page they are looking.
Put effort on your homepage. Studies show that 80% of a website’s traffic goes to the homepage. When a visitor gets to your homepage, the clarity of the message should be quick and easy to digest. It has to have your value proposition.
Navigation should be user-friendly. Pages should be clearly labeled and links to social pages must be accessible.
As your online presence continue to expand, you can make use of visitor data to improve your startup and this is when analytics’ role come to play. Overall, analytics work to track your site visitor’s behavior providing valuable data such as where they come from, how long they stayed in your site, which page is viewed the most — just to name a few. The numbers presented in your analytic tool help define your future goals and optimize your online strategy.