The perfect website for small and medium businesses

The design of your website is much more than a mere composition of colors, shapes, fonts and features.

Ideally, it reflects the values and visions of your brand. It allows visitors to immediately associate your brand with your industry, makes a good, appropriate impression in this regard right away and offers identification points. If you succeed in creating such a web design, which also conveys a certain unique position compared to the competition, this can help your branding enormously.

In addition, your web design should be functional and precisely tailored to the expectations of your target group. All particularly important areas or functions should ideally be quickly and intuitively accessible as well as usable.

Not to forget: Today, your web design must also look and function optimally on portable devices alone due to the - also B2B - ever-increasing user base of mobile devices. A responsive web design is often the most appropriate solution here.

Both the usability and the mobile capability are not least highly SEO-relevant.

Navigation is extremely important in terms of usability. If it is optimally adapted to the respective industry and target group, this contributes significantly to (potential) customers finding what they want or need really quickly.

As a result, the website is likely to be used particularly intensively. This, in turn, increases the chances that targeted conversions - from visiting centrally business-relevant pages to making contact and direct purchases - actually take place.

Furthermore, the intensity of use of a website transmits important signals that search engines use for their ranking evaluations: The more extensively the pages of your website are used, the better.

When (potential) customers are specifically looking for your business on the web, the home page is almost always the first touchpoint with your brand. Even if they go to other pages first, visitors often go to the start page in addition to get an overview.

Accordingly, you should make your home page appealing, functional, and targeted according to the design and usability aspects mentioned above.

In addition, give your visitors at best a comprehensive overview of your brand with central performance information and all important USP (unique selling points) - always with a focus on customer needs.

Furthermore, make sure that viewers find many reasons on your homepage to look around in the areas of your website that are central to your business, to contact you, to buy directly or to complete other business-important conversions.

No matter what you offer - your portfolio should be provided centrally and be quickly comprehensible. Prospective and existing customers alike like to get a comprehensive picture of the companies they work with or buy from, especially in B2B. For you, there is also an increased chance that other of your services will also receive attention and perhaps be used. A hidden service page and lengthy texts about your offers are a no-go!

After all, your visitors are looking online for real added value, i.e. information or products that really help them to solve a specific problem or satisfy a specific wish. In addition, they usually have little time.

If you take this into account and present your portfolio in a target group-specific way, this can boost your sales considerably.

References can be provided - for example in the form of a description of implemented projects, the presentation of partnerships with well-known customers or simply the naming of individual partners for whom you are active as a supplier - in almost any company context.

You should definitely explore your options carefully and, if the opportunity presents itself, list the most impressive references possible on your website.

For one thing, these examples give (potential) clients very precise insights into your work. Perhaps they will even recognise their own requirements in a project you have already realised and will therefore rate your company as the optimal solution.

On the other hand, references also offer a very good opportunity to regularly put new content online - and that is again relevant for SEO.

Today, more than ever, (potential) customers want to know who they are dealing with before signing a deal. Especially in the B2B sector, large sums of money are often involved and long-term commitments are not uncommon. Under these conditions, you naturally don't want to cooperate with just any company. Accordingly, about-us pages on websites in the B2B sector are almost always closely scrutinized.

But also B2C (potential) customers are looking more and more closely. Fake shops, data theft and other criminal machinations on the net that are always in the media also lead to people increasingly informing themselves about the companies they might buy from.

If you present yourself authentically on the presentation page of your company, i.e. do not just play out flat advertising messages, show yourself to be close to the customer through direct contact options, among other things, and ideally signal personality - for example, through insights into your daily work - you significantly increase the chances that your services will actually be used.

For B2B SMEs, direct contact with (potential) partners is particularly important - not least because of the typical requirements in this business area mentioned at the beginning of the previous paragraph.

Ideally, you present yourself in a sociable and communicative manner even before the business deal is concluded. In this way, you signal to interested parties that they can always reach you quickly and easily as a partner, or that they can get help from you. This is a powerful selling point in both B2B and B2C.

This also increases the chance that interested parties will contact you during their customer journey, perhaps to receive further information. This will give you leads that you can very effectively guide towards a buying decision.

Providing your address, a phone number and an email address are, of course, absolutely standard. In many business areas today, however, something more must be offered in order to really convince the respective target group to contact you.

Direct communication options via live chat or video chat, social media and messenger are expected by more and more customers. So take a close look at how your target group prefers to communicate.

Through a blog, you can provide regular updates about your business, important industry news, or even tips on how to best use your products or other matters important to your buyers. At best, through such website content, you not only provide added value that helps your target audience solve specific problems or needs, but also gradually position yourself as an expert in your field. The benefits of being an expert probably need no further explanation.

This development is also supported by the fact that Google and Co. consider regular, value-added as well as accordingly probably much used content to be particularly relevant. This content thus tends to be ranked far in front. This brings you more reach, but also pushes your expert status: Namely, if you always appear prominently in the rankings of the majorsearch enginesin typical search contexts of your target group.

For websites used for business purposes, specific legal standards must always be observed in Germany. The provision of an imprint and the consideration of data protection regulations are the central factors here.

In any case, there must be a page with the title "Imprint" on which visitors can find all information according to Telemediengesetz § 5. This includes, among other things, the exact address, contact details, but also the VAT identification number and the legal form of your business.

The data protection guidelines are far more complicated. In general, you must explain any use of visitor data in a separate privacy policy. Furthermore, a notice on the use of cookies with differentiated consent options for your website users is required. Additional requirements result from the orientation of your business on the web. In any case, you should consult an appropriate legal expert.