Creating Your Online Home: Ensuring Professionalism and Appeal in Your Small Business Website
As a small business owner, it’s crucial that your website reflects the professionalism and appeal that your target audience seeks. Think of your website as your online home.
Just as you would design your physical home to reflect your personality and make guests feel welcome, your online home should express your unique coaching style. It should facilitate communication with potential clients and make it easier for them to get to know you, appreciate your approach, and ultimately, build trust in your abilities.
To accomplish this, you should consider enlisting the services of a professional website designer. These specialists have the expertise and experience to effectively translate your vision into a functional, attractive online platform.
Their job is to ensure that your website not only looks professional but also operates seamlessly, enhancing the user experience and inviting more visitors to interact with your content.
Investing in professional website design is not just about having a visually appealing online presence. It’s also an investment in your business’s growth and success.
The more welcoming and professionally curated your site is, the more likely people are to join your tribe, becoming loyal followers and, eventually, clients or customers.
In essence, a professionally designed website is a strategic business move that can yield significant returns. It’s an investment in you and your business.
1 – The Plot of Land – Hosting
When you want to build a new house, you first need a plot of land. When searching for one, many factors can be involved. Chief among those are how much it will cost and how safe it is.
If the land is prone to flooding or in a dangerous area, you probably need to keep looking. Hosting is the land we’re going to build the website on.
Choose the wrong hosting company and you could have problem after problem dealing with downtime and server security. No use building a beautiful home that gets flooded twice a week, right?
2 – Your Mailing Address – Domain Name
Your house’s mailing address determines where you can be contacted as well as which services are available to you. Certain electric or wireless Internet companies may or may not service your particular address.
The same is true of domain names. This is where you can be reached online, and it may determine who can reach you and how visible you are.
For example: which mailing address would you rather have? 1515 Jackson Road or 473625 George Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor the Third Boulevard?
It can make a big difference—one is easily remembered, the other is impossibly confusing.
3 – The Foundation – Platform or CMS
A house will not stand without a solid foundation. So it’s incredibly important it’s done the right way. The same is true of a website platform, it’s the building block upon which everything else is erected.
In the case of a housing foundation, it allows for walls to stand on top of it, flooring to lay evenly, etc. The platform we use at JoLi Design Solutions is WordPress, a Content Management System (CMS) which is powerful but user-friendly. It is highly customizable and allows us to do everything else so much more seamlessly.
4 – Let’s See the Blueprints – Wireframes
If you’re building a house, you probably have an idea of how you want the layout. Living room next to the kitchen? Long hallway to go to the bedroom? Two stories or one? These are all valid and interesting questions that need to be addressed before the building ever really starts.
Wireframes function as the blueprints of the website. While we don’t create a true shell of the website, we do create an initial design of the homepage for clients to approve very early on in the process.
This gives them an idea of the website’s layout, the navigation to move around the site, and how content and images will be displayed.
JoLi Design Solutions remains in contact with our client throughout this process because we want to be sure that the “blueprints” match their expectations and needs.
5 – The Construction Phase – Website Design and Development
This is the part of the building process where so many people get shafted—both in homes and websites. You can get something that is presentable but which is not structurally sound.
Or it could be solid as a rock but as ugly as can be. You want a house built to stand the test of time and be beautiful. For that, you need to find professionals who know what they are doing and who respect the process.
Same is true for website design and development. At JoLi Design Solutions, we take great pride in our work and enjoy creating beautiful and functional websites for our clients. We respect the process and we know what we’re doing.
6 – Interior Design – Website Design
People build homes to be comfortable and beautiful. They want homes to convey a sense of personality and style. This is true of websites as well—which is where we come in.
We take your wants, ideas, and business goals and make your vision come alive. Think of this as the phase of home construction where we’re painting walls, picking doorknobs, and deciding which windows we want.
7 – Moving In Furniture – Content Migration
If you have an old website, you will want to move in your old content, which can take time but needs to be done right. If it’s a brand new website, you’ll need content. We help you move in with ease. Simple, Effective. Hassle Free
Build a House That Lasts
JoLi Design Solutions has, on plenty of occasions, worked with clients who come to us because someone else messed up their website. We can (potentially) clean up the mess, just as a good contractor can fix a problem in an existing house.
However, we are at our best when we get the opportunity to participate in the home building process from start to finish. When we build a website, we give coherent design elements and functional goals across all phases. We want to build something you can be proud of.
JoLi Design Solutions is a WordPress Website Design & Marketing Studio based in San Antonio, Texas. We create, host and maintain WordPress websites that help small service-based businesses automate their marketing, drive conversions and generate more leads.
We are a small but mighty team of 2 (husband and wife). We have a love for nature, coffee, travel and providing our clients with a first-class experience.
Our various capabilities allow us to help clients develop strong web presences and online marketing capabilities.
