Local and small businesses are usually confined to a certain area only, so their targeted audience is also geographically limited. Here is Dubai and all around the UAE business are focusing more on their websites to promote a positive brand image to improve brand visibility. A good quality web design makes a good impression on the visitors and help building trust. For small local businesses it is important to have a better online presence, it will help them getting discovered by the local audience and it will also help them expand exponentially. Usually small local businesses don’t have big budgets for their marketing so they are reluctant to invest in websites. However studies showed a lot of popular eCommerce companies have started as a small local business in a region or city and then slowly evolved into a big business. All types of small local businesses such as brick and mortal shops, startups, grocery store, barber shop, salon, hardware store, car repairing workshops, and such small scale businesses can benefits from the websites. These day people are spending a lot of time online searching and surfing the internet. This has a great potential for growth and progress. If you are a small local business and want to expand or want a better exposure here are some tips that will help you in designing your local business’s website.
First of All, Set Your Goals and Make a Plan
It is important that you have a clear goals and objectives of your web design project. Think critically, what do you want to achieve from your website, is it brand awareness, or are planning to offer any online services such as online purchase, or are planning to have a website to compete your competitors, or you simply want to target more people and have plans to expand your operations. Whatever you want to achieve from your website it has to be very clear in your mind before starting a website. Once you have set a clear goal of creating a new website or revamping your existing website the next thing that you should have is a clear plan. Not a project plan for website development, but a plan which will or could help you in achieving your goals.
For example, I want to revamp my website to include smartphone compatibility or responsiveness, or let say I am currently operating in Dubai and want to reach out to the audience in Sharjah as well. Similarly set your goals and then make a plan, in our example the plan would be to hire web designing company and let them create a website which you can market either by paid advertisements or simply by focusing on your SEO. This is how you should have a goal set and then a plan which will help you in achieving your goals and objectives.
Select a Good Content Management System (CMS)
The content management system or CMS is software tool that help webmasters to create and manage the digital content on the website. These days, especially in Dubai and all around the UAE the websites have become a very dynamic communication medium. Earlier there were times when a business might not need to update the website for many years, now a days, the market trends have been changed and the websites have become very important strategic tool for marketing and branding. It is extremely important for a small local business to be able to update their website regularly. However, small businesses often don’t have enough resources to hire a programmer or services of a web design agency which do the website updates for them, so it is crucial that you choose a very easy-to-use content management system (CMS).
There are multiple things that you might require to update on regular bases, for example if you are promoting certain products or services you can put them on the website, if you are running some promotional offers, or any such thing, it can be advertised on the website. The images can be changed, the textual and multimedia content could require an update. You might have news and announcement sections, where you want to put more news. A small local business’s website should be able to utilize the full potential of the SEO or search engine optimization. Mostly business post blogs and content that interests their audience. All such things can be easily done only when you are using a good content management system. There are so many different types of content management system such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Wix and many more. The WordPress is the world’s most used platform and it is also very good for small local business, however it doesn’t matter what CMS you chose the only thing that matters is that the small local business’s website should have a great CMS.
Create an Engaging Web Design
Web design is the extremely important aspect of a website, it is the very first impression of the visitors and its look and feel can hugely impact a brands image and identity. For a small local business having a captivating web design is absolutely necessary. A web design alone is not enough the content and the user experience are also very important. If you have any online purchase facility or are planning to have one in future then pay more attentions to your users’ experience and user interface. The web design itself is just the visual look and feel of a website, it includes design elements, menu, styles, color schemes, color pallets, backgrounds, and such things. However the content is the text, pictures and photos, videos or any kind of media you are posting on your website. It is extremely important that both content and the design synchronize deeply to present you message or goal. The user must not have to search or surf your website to understand about your business, in fact the first landing screen should be able to express your brand and business clearly.
Here some must have features or qualities of a good web design:
Homepage Design
The homepage is the most viewed page on any website. For small local business this page is also equally important. Whenever a user reached to your website’s homepage it take them only a fraction of a second to build an impression of that business in their subconscious mind. Then the user starts to absorb the information form the web page. The very first thing any user notice is the area that is under the menu and logo, which is mostly a slider or an image or a video. In some cases it could be search tool or such thing. However, it doesn’t matter what type of content you have in this area, the important thing is that this area got the most attentions. If a visitor will like it only then they will scroll further or explore the site, else they will close it. So make sure you are putting all the important things in that section. Then the rest of the homepage should have all the information of all your products and services, in case you are an eCommerce business then put all the categories, or at least most important categories. Do not make homepage too long and too complex, make it simple and short, and try to maintain a flow of information. This is how a homepage for a small local business should be designed.
Internal Pages
All of the internal pages usually follow the same theme as that of the homepage except few landing pages which are purpose build for marketing campaigns or any other purpose. Even for the eCommerce the product pages follow the same web design theme except the body of the page which contains the information about the product and it also includes the online purchase process. Make sure you have a detailed About US page which should have information about the business and its mission statements and vision or such information. These information are very helpful for building trust and brand reputation. The Contact Us page is must, add privacy policy, terms of use and return policies as well. Then as per your business’s niche add more pages. Make sure all internal pages are following the same look and feel of the web design theme which was established for the Homepage.
Scrolling, Micro Interaction and User Interface
These days in Dubai and all across the UAE business are rapidly adopting unconventional methods of scrolling, some are using parallax, some are using horizontal scrolling, some are using graphics and animations, some are utilizing various loading techniques to load more content upon scrolling. All those methods are great but it is important to understand how these methods will help the user to reach to the content. The micro interactions are also a great way to engage your website visitors. The micro interactions are the micro animation and responses of the user interface which trigger by mouse or any other input. That is a great way to design captivating web pages, as whenever a user move their mouse or hoover they could see a visible change in the design, which increase curiosity and the user keep scrolling through the web pages. There are so many other techniques used to make a user interface more interactive and attractive for the website visitors.
Well-planned Navigational Structure
The information architecture and well-planned navigational structure plays a vital role in any website’s success. Mostly the visitors reached to a website is because either they are searching for some information, it could be a product or service, or it could be anything but the important thing is that a user is coming here to find the information they are seeking for. So it is crucial that all the information are not scattered all over the website but should be well-organized and well-managed information structure and navigation. Sometime business try to link all their internal pages in the menus which is also not right, in fact the menu should be a doorway to various categories. It should provide links for all the internal pages. Make sure all the information are in a right flow, for example, let us take a case of salon, in that case if a page is providing information about hair cutting service, it should also provide information or link for the information related to all services which are relevant to the hair cutting and styling, if you think you have too many pages, then at least link the important pages/services or popular services and products. Do not merge irrelevant information and pages, this will distract your users.
Content of the Website
The website content is considered to be the backbone of the website. The web design is nothing without the content and the content is nothing without the web design. Both are equally important and when the web design is prepared in a way that if focuses better on important content the user experience is improved which also improves online conversions and help building a better brand identity. Here in Dubai and in other emirate of UAE everyone has access to the high speed internet, which gives rise to the multimedia content. The multimedia content is important too, but make sure you have proper headings, headlines and taglines which can influence the user’s decision of making a purchase. It is also important to have textual description. For the text use normal and plain language. Here in UAE as almost all emirates including Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi have expats from all over the world, however the national language is Arabic, so it is also very helpful to have multi-lingual websites. The multi-lingual websites add value to user experience and improve online sales and conversions.
Responsive Web Design and Cross Platform Compatibility
In Dubai and all across the UAE everyone have smartphones and access to the high speed internet. People tend to spend hours on their smartphones on daily bases. In fact studies shows that people do more internet searches from their smartphones than on the traditional computers or laptops. Which is why responsiveness or smartphone compatibility is a must have feature these days. Another important thing which most businesses and web designers over looked is the cross platform compatibility. The cross platform compatibility is that the website and web design provides identical user experience on all supported devices and platforms. The devices are different screen sizes which are either laptops or desktop PCs and smartphones, a responsive website have ability to detect the screen size and then render the design elements as per the screen size.
However the cross browser platform compatibility is the compatibility with different operating systems (Windows, MAC, Linux, Android OS, iOS, etc.) and different web browsers. As the Windows users prefer to use Google Chrome, MS Edge, Firefox, the MAC users usually use Safari, the Android users use Google Chrome or Opera and the Apple Mobile Devices (iPhone and iPad) users use Safari more. The web design is a combination of different source codes and programming languages, each reacts different of different operating system and also in different web browsers. In fact different web browsers behave differently on different operating systems as well. This is why the cross platform compatibility is also very important along with the responsiveness or smartphone and tablets compatibility.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
For a small local business the search engine optimization or SEO is extremely important. As all small business have limited budget for their marketing, so it is important to get organic traffic to your website. The organic traffic is the traffic coming from search engines such as Google and MSN search engine. When the web designers are designing and programming websites, they sometime use such programing languages which stop the search engines to read the content of the website. For example if all the text is loaded through scripts or is in a video which are not readable for the search engines. If a search engine will fail to read the content of the website, they can’t understand the subject of the website or the content and they will not rank it in their search engine result pages (SERPS). It is important to make sure all of your website content is readable for the search engines.
Furthermore there are certain codes and scripts used to make web pages more visible for the search engine and to help search engine in understanding the subject of the web pages. For example, the Meta Data which includes the web page’s title and web page’s short description which is only meant for the search engine and are not visible inside the webpage. Some browsers may use that title as the tab/window title as well. There are so many other things such as language identifiers, location markers, rich snippets, schema and structured data, which is also very helpful for the search engines. These things will help small local businesses to rank higher in local searches and they can get more free organic traffic from the search engines which will also increase the chances of getting more online conversions.
Conclusion
As small local businesses have limited budgets and they are always hesitant in investing their marketing, especially online or digital marketing. However a good website can do wonders for small and local businesses. The very first thing is to set up a goal and target for your website project either it is a completely new website or a revamp. The next step is to make a plan and estimate your budget limit for that. The very first step for designing a local business website is to choose an appropriate content management system (CMS). As a small or local business might not afford to hire a dedicated webmaster or services of a web designing firm. So, it is important that the small business owner or the management would be able to update their website without any dependency. The next step is to design the website. The homepage, internal pages, navigational structure, content, and responsiveness and cross platform compatibility are very important.
These are some features that very important for a successful small local business website. The search engine optimization (SEO) can be very helpful for the small businesses as it could bring free website traffic which help business to improve online conversions and leads. If you are a small local business owner and planning to design a brand new website or a revamp for you existing website, do feel free to let us know. RSI Concepts is a leading web design Dubai company, we have hundreds of satisfied customers who achieved their goals with our web designs. You can reach us out through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
