Hello, welcome to another post from SOHODOX to help you make smart moves to take your small business ahead. This time we thought of sharing some real cool tips on managing your business website. Before reading this, you could first read up our post on “How a small business can book a website domain & have its own email ids”. One of the first things that you need to think of when you start managing your own website is the strategy.
Getting the basics right
On the web, your website is what people see before they decide to meet you or purchase your products. Obviously the content on your website needs to be accurate and engaging. You must let your audience know exactly how your small business can help them. The tricky part however is choosing the right kind of tone for your content. Selecting the right kind of tone on web is nothing more than pure marketing sense. If you sell lemonades, talk about the flavour, thirst quenching ability, and freshness. Easiest way to do this is imagining talking directly to your customer or client. What do you say in a pitch? How do you sell your products in real life? Think of these things before actually starting with the layout, and making the content strategy.
Selecting a layout / theme
It’s the age of presentation, and how you present your website says a lot about your business. It’s not much different from a business meeting. Although not all meetings are won on the basis of the kind of attire you have, it does add into the whole pitch directly or indirectly. Think of the website layout as your official attire. If you usually sell to little kids, you can wear bright colours, have clowns, same cannot be said about folks on the Wall Street. (However some of them could be highly amused for sure). To get this right, just keep it closer to your brand colours and shapes. You can’t do much wrong with that. If you are still not sure, just select a standard non-descript, easy on the eyes layout.
Getting a CMS
Another thing which you may want to think about at this point is the choice between going for tools like using a Content Management system or making a static website. This largely depends on how frequently you are going to update your site, and what kind of content you are going to put on it. Generally, it’s a good idea to use a Content Management System so that you can update majority of the sections yourself.
Planning the Content Strategy
Once you are sure of the kind of platform you are going ahead with, you can decide on the content strategy. If you are not going to update the content more frequently, it would be better to simply go for the content that tells users everything that they need to know and plan the content so that they call you up for more information or send a mail to you. In short your ‘call to action’ needs to be loud and clear. You could start working on a series of posts a bit earlier than their intended publishing dates. This way you would always have some time to manage other parts of your business. Simply start creating documents for posts and save them according to the plan. You could use a simple document management tool to better manage your content, which can be text, pdf or images.
Creating a website for your small business is not a difficult job, and these were just some ideas that can help you get started. They should give you a smooth and functional handle over managing your website. Do keep visiting our blog to know more about smart ways to manage small business. As always we would love to hear from you. All your comments and suggestions are an inspiration for us.
