Websites are essential for every business. Simply put. A business, product, or service that does not appear online when a consumer searches for it is unlikely to survive for long. I won’t waste a lot of time explaining this to you if you’re reading this article.

A website can be extremely beneficial to any business. Your brand has an on-call sales representative who is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Would-be customers can (and will) view your small business website well before they speak to anyone at your business.

Wynmore Media specializes in fast, easy, hassle-free, affordable website design for small businesses throughout central Florida. Our services include web design, social media management, and content writing.

There is no question that it is very valuable to those who find you on the Internet – but it is very valuable to people who hear about your business through referrals and word-of-mouth as well. In order to win even these warm leads, you must present yourself in a positive light. You might be repelling referral traffic even if you have no website (or a poor website).

However, don’t let this get you too hung up – having an effective website is less difficult than most people believe. In addition, it does not have to be too expensive.

The most important thing you must remember before deciding to hire a website design company is to be educated on all of the things to consider before building (or re-designing) a website for your business.

Too many stories of web design going wrong for small businesses have been told by us over the years. The developer team disappeared entirely mid-project, promised something in a day but delivered it in a month, and many other things. Thankfully, when you work with a reputable, professional and caring web design company, none of these issues will arise.

Before hiring any web design company, let’s go over the top factors to consider.

First, there is a question I want to ask you:

Why Is Having a Small Business Website Important?

Small business owners rarely think about this question since it is crucial to begin with. You may find your answers here slightly different based on your business model – but on average, for most businesses, your website serves one or more of these functions:

Awareness

You can only be positioned as a credible business online when potential customers find your website when they search online for the products and services you offer.

Trust

It is possible to connect with your customers and build trust through your business website. To do this, you can showcase your work, customer testimonials, and reviews. The simple act of presenting a professional image (a mobile-friendly, secure website with a pleasing design) can help build trust.

Branding

Having a custom website will give you full control over how your brand appears online – ensuring consistency across all channels – both on and offline.

Customer Acquisition

One of the best ways for most businesses to gain new customers is through your website.

Revenue Generation

Businesses exist to make money, and an e-commerce website is the way to do this. An ecommerce business is one in which goods and services are purchased and sold online. Some businesses maintain both brick-and-mortar and online stores, but e-commerce can be a convenient alternative. Online shopping has become more accessible than ever before. E-commerce is becoming a popular choice for many businesses in 2021, and allows you to sell directly from your website. Offering direct customer shopping on your website is very often a good idea if you run a business of any kind. You do not need physical products to have an e-commerce site. It can work for digital products as well. (Note: some social platforms that allow you to put your catalog on their site, will not allow digital products.)

There are two ways to build an e-commerce website. If you have only one product or service, you can get a plugin called WP EasyPay that will allow you to take a payment for that one product or service on your website. If you have multiple products, a shopping cart such as WooCommerce or WP EasyCart is the other alternative.

Customer Retention

The number of times existing customers search for your business online is staggering – whether they’re to get contact information, information about your products, or any number of other reasons. It is important to keep your existing customers confident and trusting by maintaining a strong online presence.

This short list should have made the importance of having an eye-catching business website clearer (at least in a few ways) to you.

For those of you who are interested in websites, there are two main scenarios that businesses call us about:

Major Factors For Consideration

If you’re planning out your small business website, here are the top 10 things you should discuss with a website design agency.

Design

The website is your online storefront, so remember to keep that in mind. This is the first place that a customer will go to for information they need to try and solve their problem. From your website, people will judge your business’ quality and appearance, so be sure that your site reflects the image of your business as well as your brand.

Platform

The right platform should be built so that your website can scale with your business, that it not only looks good and is easy to use and maintain, but will also help search engines find and rank you higher on search results pages. The WordPress platform is our choice for building business websites – after all, over 30% of all sites online are built on it. The WordPress platform is a scalable, open source solution that makes it easy to use, easy to develop on, and helps search engines rank you in order to gain more customers.

Security

A website that does not provide a secure visitor experience will be penalized by Google (by not appearing in search results). A secure SSL is required on every page of your website – meaning you’ll lose clients if your website doesn’t show www., https://, and displays the lock icon in the browser. Fortunately, many hosting companies now offer SSL for free with their hosting packages. So there is no excuse not to have SSL installed and enabled on your website.

Speed

In these days, everyone expects websites to load quickly. A page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load is proven to lead 40% of website visitors to leave. As a result of social media, we now have short attention spans, so it is your responsibility to make sure your business website is optimized for speed, and hosted on a high performance server such as a VPS hosting account.

Mobile Optimized

Our research shows that 60-80% of all users access a website from their mobile devices as they browse. Most of the time, we search the web and visit websites while on the go via a small device in our pocket. Designing a website that works well on mobile devices is always the best approach.

Easy To Use

Consider yourself a first-time visitor when designing a website. You should offer your visitors an overview of what you offer, and make your site easy to use. On every page, your business contact information (with click-to-call numbers, for instance) should be easily accessible to a new visitor.

Focus on Conversions

There is no point in building a pretty website when it drives no specific business goals online. It should be baked into every piece of content you provide if your primary aim is to get people to call your office. The message you use on your site should be very clear and intentional if you’re trying to sell products. There are many different goals for websites, and that is okay. Your goal should be to build content that helps visitors follow the path you want them to take. Without good planning and design, none of this can happen.

Every Website Project Starts With SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be carefully considered when building (or rebuilding) a website. It is important to pay attention to all aspects of your pages, and that includes hidden elements (like meta tags and keyword planning). Without this focus from the beginning, your search engine rank will suffer and you will lose business to your competition.

Daily Back-ups

What would happen if something went wrong and you did not have a backup? That would be catastrophic for a business. Having daily backups to the cloud will allow you to restore your website with a click of a button. So don’t you think it’s a good idea to backup the site every day, and to make sure it’s secure? Yes, we think so.

Easy To Maintain

Our philosophy is that businesses should have easy to maintain websites, so anyone on their team can manage them. If you want to add or update content, it should be simple for you, and you shouldn’t have to rely on the technical support staff for simple things like adding new content or pictures. However, for many business owners, you are probably stretched thin for time. This leaves you with no opportunity to properly maintain your website. That is why we believe that a reputable website design company should be available to you 24/7, and you should have the confidence that should an issue arise, the team who built your site will be there to help you. Our business is conducted that way.

We have website maintenance plans that give you the 24/7 support you need to focus on your business.

While finding a website designer, a lot of companies fail to consider some key points. Well-intentioned companies often develop their own web pages by using ‘do it yourself’ solutions. However, their results are ultimately disappointing. The majority of the time, these DIY tools are aimed at getting a site online in a quick and dirty manner. This can have disastrous effects on your business. The fact of the matter is that any website built on a DIY tool fails to provide the business with the results a website should be providing. In order to save you from a lot of future frustration, let’s go into a little more detail here.

The Dangers Of Those Do-It-Yourself Services

Let me first ask you this question. Which type of website would you prefer? A or B?

Some new clients who began their website construction with a DIY method have enjoyed success, and in some cases, it was a good option. Some of them have put some thought into it and knew what they were doing. Many others have no clue what they are doing, and it shows. If you have no money to properly setup your website, you should probably delay starting your business until you can save up the funds to do so. Having an online presence that is properly set up will make it easier for you to focus on other important things besides growth, customer acquisition, and online visibility. The bottom line is if you do not have the training in website design, you should not be building websites. Leave it to the professionals!

As a referral traffic source, it was ideal for in-person meetings, face-to-face networking, and to have a business card URL. In other words, it accomplished its purpose. They serve a purpose.

It comes a time that as a business owner, you realize that your website should be doing all of the work of converting the visitors into clients.

What Goes On Under The Hood is Equally Important To How It Looks on The Outside.

These services aim to make it easy for people to build websites by simplifying the process. The reality is, building a website is part of building a business. Your website is your business asset that will be worth money in the long run. Having a website that’s tailored to your business needs can help you compete online with a variety of businesses with solid online presences.

Think Of Your Website Like Owning a Race Car

As a young race car driver starts winning races, they invest a portion of their winnings to make improvements to their car to make it run faster. The same is true for you as a young business owner. If you are starting off with the do-it-yourself route, and were lucky enough to get sales from it, you need to start investing in a much more improved website that can run faster. Better websites allow your business to compete at a much higher level.

When you begin to compete seriously, you need a high-performing site. Cart racing is a method of introducing a young racer to racing, much like those do-it-yourself WIX sites are a method of introducing a young business owner to the world of business. Having this experience helps the young driver (or young entrepreneur) develop the skills necessary to achieve their goals. To win a race, the driver needs a more powerful high performance race car. The construction of a high performance race car involves a lot more than the construction of a go-cart, as you can imagine.

Building A Business Does Not Happen Overnight

If you want to build a real business, you need more than just a website.

To be a successful entrepreneur, you should not be using do-it-yourself solutions to build your most important business asset. To win online, you need a cutting-edge solution.

If you are reading this article, that means you are considering hiring a website design company to build your business. We are glad that you are here and are ready to help you! It is essential that you have a strong online presence to ensure your business’s success.

In closing, I’m going to tell you a little about what makes us unique.

What Makes Us Different

I have been a business owner running a seven figure agency for ten years (before it went belly up). Over those 10 years, relied on a number of processes that we’ve found led to the greatest success with website design projects. If you talk with us for even five minutes, you’ll see that we’re not your typical web design company. Some areas where we excel, and things we do differently, have been mentioned repeatedly by our clients:

It Might Seem Expense, But You Will Be Surprised at How Affordable It Really Is

Having an affordable, high-performance website should be a priority for every business. As well as fixed-price models, we believe they are commonly used for most projects. It happens all too often that websites end up being built for businesses that costs twice, three times, or even four times over what was originally estimated. As a business, we find this unreasonable. Every project we do has a flat rate, and we even offer reasonable, affordable payment plans for businesses whose website needs aren’t an urgent priority.

We Communicate In A Way That Will Astound You

The vast majority of website packages (with other web design agencies) disappear after the sale. Little accountability was provided and promises were not kept. Many developers do not communicate well with their development teams about their expectations and deliverables – or you find that what had been promised (to help close the deal) is not actually included in the package. If this happens to you, you may become frustrated. You will not feel that way by using our services. At Wynmore Media, we are confident that our sales team will be with you throughout the entire process – from the moment you make the decision up until the moment the website goes live – and after it goes live as well. We conduct business in the same honest and ethical manner as you do.

So How Can You Get Started?

First, fill out our application form to become a client. This is the first step! Once received, our team will review it and decide if we want to take on the project, and then we will call you to discuss your project. Our initial consultations are always free.

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