This article provides an in-depth look at designing and starting a small business website. It aims to help small business owners understand and be aware of the most important and challenging parts of starting a website.
Table of Contents
What Makes A Small Business Website Different?
A small business website can be much more personable than a large corporate website, and it’s usually catered more towards a local audience than a global one. A big difference also lies in the purpose and expectations that small business owners have. They want the website to be one of their main channels for attracting potential clients and making sales.
Building a small business website can be challenging due to budget, design, and content constraints. But, it’s not difficult to diligently work through these challenges.
Budget
Small business owners typically don’t have a large budget for their first website and will be looking for a solution that is cost-effective and also provides them with the most value. Unfortunately, the majority only want a website to make them appear more legitimate, which further hampers their budget.
When you work out your budget for your small business website, it’s important to think beyond appearances. Consider how your website can provide value for your potential clients. This value can be in the form of features or functionality such as downloadable PDFs, live chat or WhatsApp functionality, and self-servicing options such as dynamic forms.
Currently, you can expect to pay at least R8500 for a well-designed website that includes all the basic essentials such as live chat, contact forms, and social media integration, etc.
Functionality
One of our previous clients, who had just started their small business, wanted their website to provide a custom function for their customers to store and retrieve sensitive information. The idea was good, but the legal and security aspects of that function had too many risks associated with it. As a result, the client ended up implementing a workflow in Google Drive, which was much more user-friendly and secure.
You need to ask yourself if this function or feature is truly necessary and if it will really make a difference to your clients.
Design and Layout
When it comes to design and layout, it’s all about “putting your best foot forward” with your small business. Your design and layout will be the first impression for your potential clients before they decide to read the content on your website.
The easiest way to get a good design and layout is to approach it with simplicity and minimalism. You want to adopt a “less is more” principle since you won’t have a lot of content or information about your small business.
Here’s a couple of basic things you can apply to your website’s design:
- Limit your colour palette to 3 primary colours and 2 secondary colours.
- Choose typography that is bold and clean, and use bold, extra bold, or even black font weights for headings.
- Only create sections on your website that serve a purpose.
- Make use white and negative space around your sections.
- Make use that the layout and navigation are clean and get straight to the point.
Content
The initial content will revolve around storytelling about the small business for its home, about, and service pages. The great thing about a small business is that they can be more personable than a large company, and this opens up more creative doors in terms of showcasing and communicating the small business’s voice, brand, values, and service offerings.
You can use the following questions below to get started writing your content:
- Who are you and why should I care about your business?
- What does your business do and why do you do it?
- Why should I use your services and what makes you qualified to provide them?
- How is your business going to help me with my problems?
- How has your business helped others with their problems?
The key is to be authentic, true, and confident when you write your business-related content.
What Makes A Good Small Business Website?
There are two perspectives you need to consider: the website visitor and the small business owner.
The website visitor wants a website that is accessible, helpful, up-to-date, and solves their problem. Additionally, the website should load fast, be easy to navigate, and error-free.
You’ll know that your small business website isn’t good when it has a high bounce rate and basically no website visitors are converting into paying clients.
From the perspective of a small business owner, a good website will be one that brings in potential clients and makes sales. Also, the website will communicate their unique selling proposition, brand, and service offerings with clarity.
How To Keep Initial Costs Low When Starting Out
Again, small business owners have a limited budget when they start out, so it’s key not to overcapitalise and incur monthly costs that are a struggle to maintain. But, at the same time, they are looking for value.
Domain Registration
The average cost for a domain name registration from a reputable registrar will be between R85 and R90. It’s important that you don’t go for the cheapest domain name registrar because your .co.za domain is similar to your property title deed in it’s importance.
There have been multiple instances where registrars make it very difficult for people who want to transfer their domain to another company, and sometimes even keep it hostage for a large sum of money.
In our experience, stick to the “big companies” when you want to register your domain name.
Website Hosting
We don’t recommend that you sign up for a shared hosting package.
Shared hosting packages provide a small amount of resources (for very little money of course) for your website, and over time, the bigger your website becomes, the slower it will get. If possible, you should sign up for a managed WordPress hosting package or a website hosting package that includes a LiteSpeed web server.
If you can, stick to a South African website hosting provider to shield yourself against the USD to ZAR currency fluctuations.
Email Provider
Your website hosting package will include quite a generous amount of email functionality, which is fine when you are just starting out. However, as you do more business, you’ll need to upgrade your hosting package for increased email storage.
At a certain point, you’ll need to consider using a dedicated email provider such as Google Workspace or Office 365 since they will start costing the same amount but provide much more functionality and value, such as productivity tools and cloud storage.
SSL Certificates
By default, the majority of website hosting providers include Let’s Encrypt in hosting packages for a free SSL/TLS certificate. There’s nothing wrong with using Let’s Encrypt for a regular small business website, but if you have an eCommerce-based website that deals with large sums of money, then a paid SSL/TLS certificate will be better.
Examples Of Well-Designed Small Business Websites
Senja
Senja is a small SaaS (Software as a Service) business that makes it easy to collect, manage, and share testimonials. Their website is a very good example of how you can make a small business (it’s run by two people) appear much larger than it actually is.
Although I need to mention, they have close to 1000 clients since their build in public report from August.
EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus is a small business that makes email marketing easier and cheaper. They are bigger than Senja (10-12 employees in total) but much smaller than MailChimp, which has more than 1500 employees.
What’s great about their website is the copywriting, clean layout, precise call to action sections, and the aesthetic they’ve achieved with the subtle shapes and colors all over their website.
Prosperity Enterprises
Prosperity Enterprises is a well-known educational and wealth structuring company that empowers individuals to create financial freedom through property.
(shameless plug) Their website is one we did in collaboration with Pauline du Preez from Flair Foundry and Mignionette Fair from Edita Services.
You can read our case study to find out how we redesigned their website.
Where To Find Website Design Inspiration
Although a number of website designers will disagree, the easiest and most user-friendly place to find inspiration is from Pinterest.
Pinterest is a great place for a non-designer to find practical website design ideas and inspiration. The key is to use the correct search queries such as “minimal landing page design,” “clean small business website design,” or “black and white services business design.”
If you are looking for more intricate designs, you can look at Dribbble and Behance, but a lot of the time, the designs on those websites are more conceptual and experimental than practical.