So, you’ve started a business, and your to-do list is probably seems infinite.
Hopefully, somewhere at the top of your to-do list is building a startup website to launch your own digital marketing campaigns and efforts to drive traffic and ultimately revenue and sales for your new startup. After all, your startup website is going to act as the central hub for most of your digital marketing.
Getting your startup website’s design right is crucial, especially in the early days for a company starting up. In this blog, we’re going to be covering three major tips to keep in mind while you are launching your first website for your startup company.
Tip #1: Choosing the Right Platform and Theme for Your Startup Website
Whether you’re refreshing your existing website or creating a new one from scratch, the first thing is choosing the right platform for you and your business. Here are the most important points.
What Is The Ultimate Goal of Your Web Design?
What is the purpose or the function of your startup website going to be? Will it be online sales and e-commerce, generating leads, purely educational, are you trying to raise funds for a cause or kickstarter? This is going to be the crucial question you need to answer before choosing the right platform for your website or CMS for your web design. CMS stands for Content Management System, and that’s exactly what your website is and should be. It should be a place where you manage and organize your web design content so that your users and potential customers or clients can better learn about you and hopefully take action to either purchase your products, get in touch, donate, or whatever your startup website is meant to do.
Among the popular web design CMSs for startup websites are platforms like Shopify, for example, specifically built for selling products, whether that’s physical or digital. So it already has all the pre-built functionality to streamline the buying process in the platform, including payment processing, abandoned cart emails, order management, stock management, inventory management, product listings, categorization, and integrations with fulfillment and shipping providers, et cetera.
Another great platform for good startup websites is Wix. Wix is ultra user-friendly. It’s designed specifically for the startup, the solopreneur, the entrepreneur, the small business owner who wants something that is going to be a little bit more hands-off, easier to manage, and requires very minimal effort and minimal ongoing maintenance. This isn’t an exclusive e-commerce platform; however, it does have that functionality. The pros of choosing a Wix website is that it is all-in-one, so everything you need is built on the platform. If you wanted to do your contact forms and your email marketing, it’s all already there.
And the most popular used web design CMS around the world is WordPress. WordPress is an open source platform and integrates with just about every digital tool you can think of and can also do functions like e-commerce, lead gen, etc. The difference here is that it is purely a blank slate, and you’re building and adding on the things that you need or integrating to the tool you’re going to be using on your startup website.
Another thing to consider when choosing your web design platform is also choosing a theme. Most of these web design platforms either have themes or templates that you can work within. This makes it significantly easier for you to get a good startup website off the ground and get your MVP up and running. You can choose these themes and templates and then edit out the content and media as you see fit to match your brand, your company, and to hopefully better communicate who you are, what you do, and how you are different—what makes you different or a better choice for customers making purchasing decisions.
Some things to consider: not all web design CMS themes are created equal. There are templates on Wix, there are themes on Shopify, there are themes on WordPress. And within those platforms, the ease of use and the flexibility in web design is going to be a little bit different from theme to theme. As you get more and more flexibility, usually that learning curve becomes longer and longer. If you want an ultimately flexible, good startup website, you’re going to want to choose a theme like Elementor, or Divi, or Salient with WPBakery on WordPress, where you can basically design anything you want. If you can imagine it, you can create it with those themes. There are also more out-of-the-box themes, where it’s a fill-in-the-blank system. Your content and media goes into a pre-built structure. That’s very much like what you’ll see on a platform like Shopify. You choose a theme, and then you fill in the gaps to complete your brand story for your user on your startup website. That’s tip number one: choosing the right web design platform and theme to build a good startup website.
Tip #2: Keep the End Goal in Mind with User Engagement.
Once you’ve established what the primary function is of your startup website, and consequently, what web design platform to build your website on, this decision is the logical next step. You have to make a good startup website as user friendly as possible. While building your site, it is important to identify what your primary call to action is as well as your secondary call to action. No matter where your users are during their user journeys, they should be able to jump right to that end action. The reason why on any site, but especially a good startup website, you want a primary call to action to go right to the end goal is because if there is somebody on your website who is ready to get started—ready to buy your product, ready to schedule a demo—you want to make user engagement as frictionless as possible for potential customers to get from point A to point Z.
Once you have your user behavior figured out, then you can create your secondary or supporting call to action. What if somebody comes to your website and isn’t quite ready and needs a little bit more convincing? Can they download a resource? Can they request a quote instead of schedule a meeting? Can they learn more about your product instead of buying it now? Can they put your product in a wish list instead of putting it in their cart? The secondary call to action is for those users who are right on the brink, who just need a little bit more time. Everybody else in their user journey, when they’re first coming to your startup website or they’ve been there before a couple of times, the calls to action for them will always be there, but the site will serve as the resources and the information that they’re looking for.
As you’re building out the web design for your startup website, keep in mind what the end goal is, and keep in mind, what is the user journey for your target audience? A good startup website needs to be more than just visually appealing. Are people coming to your site for the first time, and they need to learn more? In that case, let’s implement some key elements to make it user friendly and structure it for their specific user engagement. Is most of your traffic coming to your website and ready to buy? Then let’s structure your startup website in a way where people can buy your product faster. That’s point number two. Once you’ve honed in on functionality, you can worry about making the website visually appealing. But don’t get so caught up in the design that you forget about the online tools that will do the actual work on your website.
Tip #3: Connect Your Website to Powerful Online Tools for Business Growth.
We’ve saved the best for last. A good startup website is nothing if it is not connected to tools. A startup website with just text is just about as good as the business cards in your desk drawer: you won’t leave a lasting impression. You need to connect your website to tools that perform functions and automate your marketing for you or else your startup website is basically useless.
A major decision you need to make when connecting your startup website to powerful online tools is which client relationship management tools, or CRM, you’ll want to use. All of your forms on your website—when people are requesting a quote or just contacting you with questions—should be connected to your CRM so that you can track those leads more accurately. This way they can get automatically enrolled in your email marketing, your nurture campaigns, or your newsletter. If somebody buys a product, they should be enrolled in your CRM so that you can reach out to them a month later and ask for a review, or send them an email and say, “Hey, we saw you bought this product in this category. Here’s one we think you might like.” Getting an initial customer to return is about seven times cheaper than getting a new customer to convert for the first time. A CRM is key in making that as efficient as possible. This is how you make an already good startup website work for you.
Another online tool to consider would be a live chat. You can integrate with Facebook Messenger, you can use chatbot.com, or livechat.com, or your CRM might have this feature built in, which you can integrate to your startup website. Many users prefer to get in touch in different ways. Some prefer to email directly, some prefer to pick up the phone, some prefer to chat with a chatbot or a live chat. If this is an option for you and your business, and you want to make yourself more available to more people with different preferences on how they get in touch, a live chat or a chatbot is a great way to do that.
If your website is e-commerce or you’re selling any products or processing any payments on your website, you’ll want to choose the best payment processor to make that as easy as possible for your users. If your CMS is Shopify, Shopify payments is a great option and integrates directly with Apple Pay and Google Pay. When people are shopping on mobile devices, they can use their saved payment methods without ever having to visit your site previously. If you’re on a platform like WordPress and using WooCommerce for eCommerce, then you’ll want to use a payment processing tool like Stripe.com or Authorize.net. Make it as easy as possible for your users to purchase your product and make that checkout experience as frictionless as possible, even on a startup website.
While we’re talking about e-commerce on a startup website, we should also be thinking about shipping and fulfillment, order tracking, etc. If you have an e-commerce website, one of the expectations that most users are going to have when purchasing a product is the ability to track their order. You can integrate with shipping providers like FedEx and UPS through tools like ShipStation, or ShipMonk, and show your users in their order summary where their order is in terms of the fulfillment process and the shipping and delivery process as well.
The last major thing to consider in this category is integrating with powerful analytical tools. You cannot make smart marketing or advertising decisions without having accurate analytics. Integrating or connecting a good startup website with Google Analytics, now known as GA4, is going to provide valuable insights which will be key in making those important decisions when it comes to how you spend your ad dollars, how you write your blogs for search engine optimization, which partners you attract, or even the style of social media posts and which social media platforms you prioritize. Google Analytics or GA4 is going to be indispensable when launching your first startup website. It can even help you decide which pages from your existing website need to stay, and which new pages you might need to build out.
In summary, if you are first getting started as a solopreneur or entrepreneur and you are making your first website for your startup company, you need to keep in mind these three major tips:
- Making sure that your startup website is built on the right platform for you. Is it Wix? Is it WordPress? Is it Shopify? Is it Squarespace? And within that, making sure that you’re choosing the right theme and design for you to manage this website going forward. Does it have the functionality you want? Is it easy to use? Or do you get frustrated and then end up letting your website become antiquated because it’s frustrating for you to go in and update your website and manage your products or your pages?
- Make sure you keep the end goal in mind. Don’t get distracted with the bells and whistles on your startup website. Make sure that your whole website is focused on the end goal. Ultimately, that can look like generating leads or selling products—those activities that generate revenue for your company.
- Making sure that your website is connected to powerful online tools and integrations. Your website is nothing but a static website without them. The right tools prepare your business for boosting website traffic through successful marketing efforts in search engine optimization, advertising, social media, partnerships, and more.
As a business owner, it’s difficult to juggle all the roles you need to manage. Involving third party services may be a smart move if you don’t have the time necessary to implement all of these startup website tactics. If you need any help in making these decisions, bringing your creative ideas to life, or just want to brainstorm next steps the digital marketing strategy for your startup company, reach out to Big Red Jelly and our web designers will be happy to guide you through this decision making process.
