Website Ideas for the Small Business Owner to reach future clients

What do you need to know as a Small Business Owner about changes in technology and design that affect your business? While you don’t need to know how to design a website for your business there are just some trends you need to keep track of one of which is using responsive or adaptive design in association with mobile and social connectivity.

What is responsive design and why does it matter for my small business you ask?
Your clients and future clients look at your website on a huge range of screen sizes, from a small smartphone up to a large computer monitor or even a projection TV in some cases. Responsive design basically takes these into account so they don’t have to scroll side-to-side in order to see your entire website. (FYI, people don’t like to scroll side to side and it just looks bad when half of the content on a website is cut off.)

Why is that important to your small business?
Technology has rapidly changed the culture and the way people shop and research who to buy from, for both products and services. Smartphones in conjunction with Social Media, especially Facebook, have taken advantage of mobility and connectivity in order to change the way a majority of people make purchasing decisions. There are still many people that use Google to research products and services on their PC or Mac, but an increasing number will consult with their social network to get recommendations. There are even some savvy individuals that will use their smartphones or tablets in a retail store to comparison shop.

Is Responsive Design or Device Specific (Adaptive) Design best for my website?
There are a couple ways to accommodate or in technical speak, optimize, for the various devices like tablets and smartphones. Responsive design will shrink or expand to fit on the appropriate screen size you are using. The other option is to create alternative designs for tablets and another design for smartphones. Creating a separate mobile design will allow you to create different look while keeping the same branding. Which is best for you? Unfortunately there is not one answer because it depends on your goals and budget. It is often more time and money to implement device specific design, but this may be worth it if you have a large number of people that purchase from you using a smartphone.

What works best for small business?
While there are many web design firms that try to be on the cutting edge of design and focus on the art or the latest technology, we believe that is not the right strategy for most small businesses. At eRose Web and Business services our focus is on marketing and specifically on ease of use for your future clients to see the benefits of working with you or purchasing your products. We also focused on writing content for clients that was keyword specific while being user-friendly so it would show up well in the major search engines like Google.

What have we recommended over the years for our clients?
Early on we used designs that were responsive to different sized monitors because it just made sense, now that is the standard because of the ever increasing and decreasing screen sizes. We can’t claim that we knew early that this trend would happen, and we occasionally accommodated clients that wanted some ‘Flash’ animation or other of the latest trends on their site. However, our bread and butter has been and continues to be responsive designs that use keyword rich content to help small business market their products and services in a variety of industries.

Alright you are probably tired of hearing about us, the main point is to consider your target audience and how they learn about your products and services. If you sell a product and most of your customers are young and trendy then using the latest social media trend along with Facebook and a mobile optimized website makes a lot of sense. However if you market to businesses then maybe you want to use a basic responsive design and ask your existing clients to recommend you on their LinkedIn network. Sometimes you just need to try different marketing outlets to see what works well for your small business.

If you are like me sometimes you get so focused on running the tasks of your business you get yourself stressed out and forget to appreciate why you got into business and to really enjoy it. In effort to both remind myself to enjoy life and the benefits of being self-employed I plan on signing off my blog articles with a reminder to stop and smell the roses (Is that too cliché or obvious? Too bad that’s the direction I went!).

Stop and Smell the Roses…Remember to Enjoy being an Entrepreneur!