7 Essential Business Website Tips

Your business website must do a few things correctly in order to accomplish the goals you have set for it. Here are some essential business website tips that every business owner can use.

1. White Background - traditional works best - high contrast black text on a white background with blue or some other bold colored links, works well. A white background is seen as clean and nice, besides being very easy to read black text on it. For a business website white should be the predominant background color behind almost all text to keep the site light and bright. The default blue links are best, as the world knows what blue text in a site means - it means a link.

2. Fonts - Times New Roman and Courier fonts must not be used for your business website except in small quantities. The predominant font should not be one of those. Instead, use Trebuchet MS, Arial, Verdana, or Helvetica font for the main text on your site. These are easy to read and familiar fonts.

3. Essential Business Website Pages:

About - use this page to talk about your business and the owners and staff. Photos in this section will help visitors feel connected with you. Some background bio info will build trust and visitors will either judge you to be competent or not.

Contact - offer several ways to reach you: phone, email, fax, chat, social media like Twitter or Facebook. Ideally you will create a contact form right on this page that a visitor could fill out and reach you without having to send email or choose one of the other contact options.

Disclaimer - the typical business owner doesn't pay for a lawyer to draft this page up specially for their business, but you may need to. The other option is to copy someone's disclaimer and change everything to make it relate to your business. Keep in mind, if you are sued the disclaimer on your site is probably going to be part of the case.

FAQ - the goal for a business site that is selling something, or asking visitors to sign up for information is to answer all questions the visitor may have so he or she just naturally signs up or buys - depending what your goal is. A FAQ section is ideal for listing all the questions and answers anyone could have so they don't have to contact you to ask. Your business website is like another employee that converts sales for you, converts leads, and answers questions so your support team doesn't have to.

Privacy Policy - everyone wants to know what is happening to their data they input at your site. If you have any form on your site or use cookies at all - you need to mention that in your privacy policy. Even if you don't have any forms or cookies you can say that you respect individual privacy to a high level, and make people feel more at ease about visiting your site.

4. Contact Info on Every Page - in addition to a contact page you should (must) put easy-to-see contact information on every page of your business site - maybe in the right hand column - and keep it in the same place for all pages. All visitors should be able to find your contact information very quickly when they need it.

5. Lead Generation - give away something of value like an ebook report, audio, or video file in order to get visitors to sign up for your email list. The difference between collecting someone's email and not is the difference between having them as a potential customer for the two minutes they are browsing your site, versus the two years they stay subscribed to your email list. It's a big difference!

6. Sell Something - business websites must be selling something. You might be selling a product, a service, or yourself. Either way - you're selling. Create clear calls to action to help remove any ambiguity about what the visitor should do on your site.

7. Style and Hype - a site filled with hype isn't attractive to very many people, and you aren't going to build a lot of trust using it. Exclamation points, huge fonts, and using many different colors in your website are bad style ideas. Business websites are always going for a professional look. Find some of the most professional sites in your niche and figure out why they give the impression of professionalism. Copy these features for your own business site.

Author, Vern Lovic is a serial entrepreneur that has developed hundreds of websites and incorporated dozens of businesses over the years at his partner's site, Start Florida Business (.com).

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