9 Steps to Improve your small business website

As a web designer & developer, I see a lot of websites, many of them belonging to small businesses. I'm also an independent, running my own business - my website is my shop window, so this subject is close to my wallet heart. There are some common things missing in a lot of the websites that I look at, things that would really improve the website and make it work harder for its owner. Fortunately, most of the missing bits are fairly easy to add.

This list is intended to make you think about your own website and give you practical, actionable steps that you can take right now to improve things. None of these things are difficult and most of them can easily be done in an hour or two. Print this off, mark the ones that you think you need to work on, and tick off one a week.

Thin is in

Don't try to pretend like you're HyperGlobalMegaCorp Inc if you're not. Make a virtue of your smallness and actively point this out on your site. Most people have had enough of being given the run around by giant corporations, call centres and anonymous 'service'. If you're a real person who can provide a real, personal service, make sure people know. This is an example from the Codeistry About page, taken on the 26^th of March 2009:

and this is one from the excellent InnerEcho's About page:

If you don't already have a strong USP (Unique Selling Point) - a reason to come to you rather than your competition - this could well be it.

Action Items:

Explain why dealing with a small business is better for your customers. Make it explicit that you're small and point out all the advantages this brings: personal contact directly with the real deal, quick response, personal & flexible service, etc...
Have an About page that actually tells people all about you and your team, if you have one. If it's just you, say so, don't be shy and don't pretend to be bigger than you really are - remember, small is beautiful. Recent photo's, up to date info on what you're doing and how to contact you. Link to everyone's blogs, etc...

Make a personal connection

Don't write in corporate-ese or lawyer speak - write like the normal, likeable people you are. Be open, honest and approachable. Put your picture on there and tell people about yourself. Enthuse about your business; if you aren't interested in it - or your enthusiasm doesn't come across - then no one else will be either.

To-do list:

Have a blog and write with passion about what you do. Everything is interesting to someone - most people don't run their own business and most people don't do what you do - what's normal and everyday for you might be amazing for someone who's never done it. Tell people about what you do, why you do it and how you do it. How do you run your business? Why do you make the decisions you do? What are you planning to do in the future? Talk about and around your subject. Check out these small business or workplace bloggers for inspiration:
Don't have a boring News or Press Releases section - normal people aren't interested in this PR speak - they're interested in what other normal people are up to, so just tell them on your blog.

Let your customers do the talking

Assuming that you've got some ecstatic, happy or even merely satisfied customers, get them to go on record and say something about you and what you did for them - in other words, get some customer testimonials. Some websites have a 'Testimonials' page which is a good start. You should also spread your testimonials out around your site and use them to re-enforce your other messages. If you've got good feedback on a particular job, then add that testimonial to that jobs page in your portfolio. If you've got some really good comments from customers, put these where you think they'll have the most impact - maybe on your homepage, or on your 'Contact Me' page, to give people a little nudge and some extra incentive to contact you.

These guys are the best in the world - Bob, USA

Although this testimonial says you're the best, it lacks credibility - it looks like I just made it up (I did). It isn't very specific, it doesn't mention what you did, or how you helped and it doesn't really come from a credible source. Bob, USA? That doesn't sound like a real person to me. This would be much better and is worth putting in some effort to get:

You guys are the best! You really helped showcase our widgets - we've seen customer feedback and inquiries increase by 15% in the last month and we're very pleased with your hard work and attention to detail.

Bob Bobsson, Founder, Bob's Widgets, Sacramento, CA, USA

The more credibility you can get across, the better. You might have trouble persuading people to let you use a picture of them, but it adds so much credibility to their story, it's probably worth your while trying to persuade them. All testimonials must be truthful, honest and freely given - but I don't see why you couldn't offer a discount and back-links to their website if they'll let you use a little picture of them to go with it.

How to garner testimonials:

Strike while the iron is hot - the time to ask is just after you've done a good job, while your performance is fresh in your customers minds.
Phone or Skype your customers and do a debrief after each job - talk over what went well and what didn't. Record the conversation (with their permission) and write it up afterwards.
Go through old emails a pull out good quotes from your customers.
Email them what you've assembled and get their permission to use it
More testimonials advice:

Make conversion easy

Decide what you're trying to achieve with your website - what do you want visitors to do on your site? Buy something? Contact you? Find something out? Whatever it is, this is your conversion goal - focus on making that as easy as you possibly can for visitors. Everything you do should be focused on making this goal incredibly easy for your visitors. Even the tiniest improvements to the visitors journey will translate into more conversions and more satisfied customers.

Things to think about:

Do this stuff: Ten ways to improve your website conversion rate
Think about things from your potential customers point of view, or even better do some simple user testing.
Depending on your goals:
- Designing for the user experience in ecommerce

Make contacting you easy

Even if this isn't your main goal, being easily contactable by your customers and potential customers is all part of providing a friendly, approachable service. The simplest way to do this is to provide your contact details in an easy to find place, along with a short, simple contact form which allows people to fire off a quick contact message there and then. The easier you make it, the more likely it is that people will do it.

Next steps:

Have a contact form, that goes to a real person's mailbox and gets responded to immediately, if not sooner. Here's the Codeistry Contact Form, as an example.
Have all your contact details on your contact page - picture, name, address, phone, email, skype, twitter, mobile phone, blog etc....
If customer contact is your website's main aim, make this super easy - put a tiny mini contact form in your page footer on every page:
If it's not your main aim, at least put an obvious link in there.

Improve your website's navigation

This has improved over the years - but most websites could still be easier to get around. Think about your site's structure - is it simple and logical? Draw your self a site-map, like a family tree, on one sheet of A4/letter paper. Did it all fit on easily? Does it really need to be that big? If you showed a new visitor just that site map, would they know where to go to achieve their (and your) goal? Can they do it with one click? If not, why not?

Things to do:

Simplify your site structure - simpler & flatter is better, mostly.
Make your page footers more useful. Reward people for having read to the bottom of one of your pages and show them somewhere to go next. Put additional navigation there, so that people don't have to scroll back up to the top to get to it. Don't be afraid of having a long footer, or long pages. Vertical scrolling is OK and adding extra navigation and onward links into your footer makes getting to the end of a long page a destination, not a chore. The Wall Street Journal do a good job of this, and I make an effort (see the bottom of this page)
See also:

Be accessible for anyone, on any device

Your website needs to be accessible, both for human visitors and for search engines. If you don't do this, you're hitting yourself with a double-whammy - people won't be able to find you as easily because your site isn't very search engine friendly and people won't be able to use your site very easily even if they do find you. Making websites accessible is easy to do and it's now the law of the land in many countries.

Action items:

Do the stuff in my accessibility made simple article.
Read: Idiots Guide To Accessible Website Design
Read: Royal National Institute for the Blind, Web Access Centre
Read: Webcredible Web accessibility articles

Be findable

Making your site accessible is an important first step to being findable because it makes your site more search engine friendly, as does improving your navigation. Writing interesting things, writing well and being enthusiastic all make it more likely that people will link to you, making you easier to find.

Action items:

Have a look at my SEO for fun and profit article for a good grounding in Search Engine Optimisation.
Seriously, do the stuff in my accessibility made simple article.
Hubspot Website Grader - a handy free tool to asses your website's SEO status; run it on your site and sort out any problems that it finds. This is the report for Codeistry.com from March 25, 2009
Create & submit an XML sitemap to Google.
If you've got a location based business that customers need to visit, make sure Google Maps knows exactly where you live.
Spell check everything: http://spellr.us/ The number of websites I see with spelling errors constantly amazes me - if you're supposed to be making a good impression, spelling stuff wrong doesn't help. It also won't help people find you via search engines, as people won't search for your misspellings. It's not just spellings - grammar and style are very important too. If you can, get someone else to proof-read your writing; two heads are better than one.
Complete List of Best SEO-Tools

Measure & test the crap out of everything

The Google Analytics Dashboard gives you access to lots of visitor and traffic information. Get analytical with Google Analytics and Crazy Egg. Use these tools to find out what people are actually doing on your website, then do A/B split testing of your changes, so you know which changes work best.

Google Analytics is free and really good - if you aren't doing any visitor tracking at the moment, you should sign up right now. CrazyEgg heatmaps are really cool, showing you overlays of hotspots where people are clicking on your pages. Crazyegg isn't free, but it does have some really useful features, like their heatmaps showing where people are actually clicking on your pages and their confetti view which is similar, but also shows other stats for each click, like which site they came from.

Action items:

Sign up with Google Analytics and put the code they give you on every page of your site.
Sign up with CrazyEgg and start collecting more detailed stats. You can do both CrazyEgg & Google Analytics at the same time if you want, although this will slow page loads a tiny bit. I tend to use CrazyEgg to get numbers about specific changes - either ones I've just made or to research ones I'm thinking about.
Check your stats, find out what queries are bringing people to your site, what pages they like best and write more stuff for them.
You can setup Google analytics to measure you conversions - how successful you are at getting visitors to buy things, contact you, visit certain pages, etc... Set up Goals and measure your actual success and see where you're going wrong - are visitors getting halfway there and giving up?
Use Google Website optimizer to A/B split test changes, so you can see real before and after numbers and find out if your changes are really making things better.

9 Steps to Improve your small business website

Thin is in

Action Items:

Make a personal connection

To-do list:

Let your customers do the talking

How to garner testimonials:

Make conversion easy

Things to think about:

Make contacting you easy

Next steps:

Improve your website's navigation

Things to do:

Be accessible for anyone, on any device

Action items:

Be findable

Action items:

Measure & test the crap out of everything

Action items:

Further Reading:

Where next?