If your website looks outdated, you’ll lose clients. That means you’ll lose business. I am pretty confident that you do not want that. We’ve been working with clients who raised over $140m and those who just started. We always have a comment on their business site. It’s either too bland or too much.
Hence, we thought we’d create a mini guide for you to create or update your business site to fit our current business world.
Before you start, you need to know that the priorities in creating a website have changed. For instance, ten years ago, website design was critical. Nowadays, website speed and accessibility are much more valuable.
The world went from, “Wow! look at that design.” to “Ughh, one of those complex websites, bye!”
So here are the points of consideration before we guide you through our recommendations for creating a business site.
1. Website Speed
This is the mother of all factors nowadays. Check your site speed on PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix daily if you can. Check ours. At the time of writing this, here’s a screenshot.
Speed has become the mother of all elements simply because our world is faster than before. Ask yourself, “Can you order a burger and wait an hour?”
This sounds outrageous nowadays. However, twenty years ago, that did not sound like a problem.
2. Minimalistic Design
The concept of a business site and its existence has become coherent with site speed. Not only does the website have to load fast, but it also has to be easily understood. So a complex design will kill your traffic.
Keep your branding. However, a good amount of whitespace and padding on the website is important for the eye to find what it needs immediately.
3. Common Feel
Your website will not be the only business site people visit. Hence, they will automatically compare it to other websites they use. For instance, when they read a blog through Medium, then read something on your site. If the experience is not similar, then the psychological effect is not great.
Hence, review your competitors and the general feel of surrounding websites, then design it accordingly.
These are the three vital factors to keep in mind. Now let’s get to the creation of your business site.
Our recommendations are not advertised or paid for whatsoever. They are recommendations we give our clients as we believe they’re perfect.
As we’ve noticed, most of our clients do not really require a business site with severe tech functionality. Severe tech functionality is not like user signup, payment, subscriptions, etc.
It’s more like connecting drivers to riders, similar to uber. That’s a severe tech functionality that requires an app for both ends.
Specifically, some of our startup clients are in need of to prove the existence of a market or the success of a product.
Thereby, we categorize websites into two categories.
Category 1: Your business site needs to look beautiful but has simple functions (Mainly displaying your services.)
For this, we recommend you explore WordPress templates to purchase for your specific industry via Envato Market or Creative Market. Let’s say you work in fitness and looking to create a new business site to get more clients to read your fitness tips.
The best thing about this approach is you can find a button on those templates that says, “Live Preview.” This simply shows you what the website looks like. For example, for the above screenshot, here is the link to the preview.
Tip#1 - Always check the mobile version using your phone.
Usually, these templates are cheaper than $100, and you can easily install them if you have a minimal tech background. If you do not, though, we recommend you use Fiverr or Upwork to hire a freelancer to help you install this business site (This should not cost more than $100 as it is a very easy process.)
Tip#2 - Never forget to check the site speed before buying the template.
For this category of options, you will be surprised by the number of templates that exist. They’re numerous and in almost all industries. For example, if you are working in NFT, here’s another example.
Most of these templates are with a purpose. For instance, the above screenshot is about a portfolio website. This indicates that it ought to display your products. Others are more integrated towards a shop where you can connect it to payment easily and just sell.
So that’s what you ought to do if you’re looking for a beautiful business site that does not have severe functionalities. However, what if you are more of a subscription SaaS platform? In this case, we can move to our second category.
Category 2: You’re looking for a subscription-tiers SaaS platform business site.
You have plenty of options for this. However, we’d like to recommend Wave by DevDojo. It’s a simple theme that you can modify and connect with payment easily. It has the feel of the common platforms of our day.
Hence, you won’t need to do a lot. You will need to use their Tails tool to drag and drop through your design. Additionally, you’ll probably need to hire a freelancer in order to install this on your business site.
This will allow you to have a website with your branding and an easy interface, which is what you need. It’s not perfect in terms of speed, but you can decrease the elements of it to enhance it (Specifically images.)
Neither Categories: You need a more complex business site.
In this case, we’d recommend you’d find a business site designer and developer on Upwork or Fiverr. Usually, a full-stack developer does both. However, always remember our three variables at the beginning of this blog in order to actually create a successful business site.
Remember, the website is merely a channel to display the actual product or service. The product and service are what really need focus. Uber did not succeed because they have a good website. It’s because their product is needed.
So, before starting your business, we recommend you conduct market research. You can either do that yourself or find a freelancer to do that for you. We have some right here on Albusi. Here’s an example (no pressure, though.) You can also find such freelancers on Upwork or Fiverr.
Our clients’ and entrepreneurs’ most frustrating feeling is when they work for months on a website only to find a lack of product demand. So learn from them and start the right way.
If you’re thinking of creating a business, we recommend hiring a freelancer to start your business planning as a first step.
Meet The Author Of This Article
I’m Al Anany, the founder and CEO of Albusi.
Writing in the business industry has shifted my mentality toward entrepreneurship. I started on Medium in 2021 and ended up being a Top Writer of more than 4 categories and had my content viewed more than 213k times.
I always have a single goal while writing: focus on entertaining while adding value.
