Website Design FAQs
Website Design is a large subject and you may have many questions about it. Here you will find the answers to the most frequently asked questions about website design. If your question is not listed below please get in touch and we’ll do our best to answer you.
The purpose of a website for a small business is ultimately to generate leads and sales.
However, to a visitor the purpose is to find out information about your small business, its products and services and how to contact or get directions to your business.
Thus, for a small business owner to achieve their purpose of generating leads and sales they first need to help their visitors achieve their purpose of finding information.
The cost to build a website for a small business in South Africa varies enormously.
Website design prices in South Africa range between R 399 – R 40 800 and average R 3 765 for a 1 page website and R 6 254 for a 5 page website design according to our survey data. The average monthly web design package is R 399 p/m and the average eCommerce website design price is R8 445. The average monthly web hosting fee is R 107 p/m with average hourly web design rates being around R 500 p/hr.
There are many factors that will determine the price as well as what payment options are available.
Keep in mind that cheap website design is often of poor quality and having to redo a poorly designed website becomes expensive. That said, just because a website is expensive, is no guarantee of quality either.
Be sure to get a cost breakdown as well as ask questions about website design pricing before you commit.
The length of time to takes to build a website for a small business depends on the type of website design.
A custom website design will take much longer that a website design package which uses a ready made website design in the form of a website template.
A website with 5 web pages will be much faster to build than a website with 50 pages.
On average, it takes 2 – 5 days to build a small business website when a website design package is used. This also assumes that all content (images and text) have been received from the client before staring the build and does not include the time taken by the client to review the website design.
There is no set rule as to how many pages a small business website should have.
To avoid becoming overwhelmed with the website design process, 5 – 10 web pages is probably a good start when building a small business website for the first time.
However, if you ever want to generate traffic from search engines like Google then your website should probably have hundreds of web pages to target all relevant search terms.
Adding hundreds of web pages is not something most small business are capable of and so this can be done over a period of months or even years with the help of a small business SEO specialist like SME Rocket.
The most important content categories for a business website design to include are:
– Product and Service information including benefits, features and pricing
– Company information such as history, years of operation, mission, values, team members, etc.
– Contact details including phone, email address, physical address and social networks
– Testimonials, success stories, case studies, industry reports, whitepapers, ebooks etc.
The above content types are essential for website design for small business though there are other content types too such as blog articles which are also incredibly useful.
There are many elements that should be included in website design for small business with each element serving a purpose.
– Navigation – Navigation menus and links help visitors find their way around your website and are vital.
– Hero Section – a Hero section typically includes a heading related to your business, a short introductory paragraph and a call-to-action button to get visitors to view a key web page and usually an image related to your products or services.
Additional calls-to-action and contact details such as phone numbers or WhatApp buttons are very important.
– Images and Video – Images and video can help make your products and services more interesting and real to your visitors.
– Trust Elements – testimonials, case studies, partner or client logos can all help increase trust.
– Brand Identity – a website design for small business must include consistent branding elements such as a good logo design that is easily recognisable as well as consistent use of colour and fonts.
The effectiveness of website design for small business is dependent on how well the website is built.
This includes what technology it uses and especially how relevant and well written its content is and how many web pages it has that are optimised for industry search terms.
The quality of a website’s images and graphics and how fast it loads is also very important.
Usability in terms of information layouts, navigation and mobile use is also essential.
In short, the effectiveness of a small business website comes down to how much planning, quality and effort are put into it.
WordPress is an excellent choice for a website design for businesses of any size!
In fact, WordPress is the most popular website design tool as it is enormously powerful, scalable, relatively easy to use, search engine friendly, customisable and well supported.
Today, WordPress powers more than 40% of the world’s websites and it continues to grow.