Top 5 tips for Small Business Owners to consider when choosing a website

1. Get a website that can be deployed quickly with no sacrifice in functionality that can easily be updated and maintained.

When choosing a website builder, you can usually tell how easy a website builder will be to use based on the design interface and the icons.

We offer the Duda platform because it offers 100 basic templates that look wonderful and are segmented into industry categories such as restaurants, medical, portfolios, blogs, online stores, etc. Duda allows you/us to switch between different templates without worrying about losing any of the content we've created. With its smooth inline drag and drop editor, there is no need to waste time having to hard code it.

The nice part about these website is you can still get under the hood and custom code the HTML and CSS which a lot of cheaper platforms do not allow. The significantly reduces the time it takes to complete the website development allowing you to focus on project management and other operations of the company.

When it comes to Widget building, Duda widgets stand out in quality and ease of use. If you need a click to call, menu, coupons, business hours, etc, Duda takes only a second to install. The creators of Duda gave a great deal of thought to what businesses actually need and streamlined the design process based on those needs. Other platforms offer this as well, but without the flexibility in designing that Duda allows.

Builders such as WordPress offer thousands of different templates which give you a lot of options for making your website look different. However, you have to find, pay for the template and all of the plugins which gets very expensive fast.

The learning curve with other builders is pretty steep. It can take a lot of time to learn how to

• Care for and maintain the website.
• If and when to update Plugins and Themes.
• Learning and using features within a Theme.

Learning curve aside, the most common issue with other sites is that designing is tough. Other page builders out there make this easier, but if you’re not a web developer, adding those little touches your website needs to stand out is not going to be easy. Even these come with a learning curve. So no matter what, you’ll have to learn a lot before you can design anything.

Website builder functionality is essential to the successful operation of the site. If a builder is poorly laid out or too hard to understand, your company’s website might not come out working the way it needs to. Because of this, we rank Duda as a more simplistic and easy to learn website builder.

2. Make sure your website is easy to find by potential customers.

Duda and other web solutions offer built-in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) options such as In-Page Meta-Data Editing, Customizable Page URLs, XML SiteMaps, Image Alt and Description Tags, 301 Redirects, and many other features.

Duda websites are fully equipped to boost your SEO. They are able to handle all of your on-site SEO needs including page descriptions, alt tags, H1 tags, and everything else you could need. If SEO ss part of your core marketing plan, then Duda will help you make sure each page is optimized.

Other builders have useful arrays of options with it comes to SEO. In the administration portal, you can adjust the visibility settings as well as permalinks that automatically use the article title as the URL content. Other builders allow you to download the SEO plugins but again, they are additional cost in many cases where the Duda sites are already equipped.

3. Make sure your website is responsive and can be seen easily across all devices

Today, for every 3 minutes browsing, 2 of those are completed with a mobile device. It is crucial that your company’s website is mobile-friendly to keep up with business and accessibility. In fact, Google has gone to mobile indexing first in its algorithms. If your website is not mobile friendly, you will not rank as highly. Additionally, the website needs to look fantastic on tablets and any other screen size. Duda is extraordinary because not only is the design responsive, but it also lets you easily customize your website for each different viewport size. If you have a desktop design feature that doesn't look great on other device sizes, you can easily hide it. If you want to add extra buttons to your mobile site, but not on other devices, you can do that too with no coding required. You can do all of the same things with other builders, but some level of technical experience is required.

4. Make sure the website is secure

WordPress is easily the cheaper option since it is a free platform, but also the easiest for hackers to compromise. WordPress also offers personal, premium, and business plans that vary in the customization and storage space provided to the user. But you have to have additional plugins that need to be monitored for updates to ensure the site is properly secured.

Our websites are automatically updated to ensure they are secure. They are hosted on the amazon web services ensuring the highest uptime available.

The way we see it, you pay a small amount more for us to get a much better and efficient experience.

5. How is the Website supported?

Our Duda website support offers Live Chat, phone, and email. Duda offers troubleshooting help and informational guides on their responsive website builder, a mobile website builder, account & billing, product training, a widget builder, and more.

Like anything tech related, all websites will have glitches. Something as simple as updating WordPress, or themes and plugins, can wipe an entire site ending up with what the WordPress community calls “ The white screen of death . “ Since WordPress is free, you won’t find much support for fixing these issues except via the online forum.

To get help, you’ll either need a host that provides outstanding support or go searching for someone who can fix the problem for you. These people are hard to find if you don’t know where to look. It’s frustrating and has left many people with no choice but to start over from scratch. Since WordPress is the largest website platform in the world, tons of YouTube videos, forums, blogs, tutorials, and guides.

5. Which Website is best for your small business?

Small business owners need a fully functional, business oriented website that drives leads and revenue, not just a basic blog. Many website builders have options for you to expand beyond the original blog capacity to create what you or your company need. Some website builders offer more than is necessary as well as requiring additional work or skill to produce a simple website.

They can also be too restrictive demanding more time to get it to function correctly. Time you need to run your business. WordPress is not always the right tool for the job. For small business sites, it’s usually the wrong one. By switching smaller businesses with fewer needs to a website builder like Duda, not only can you save time and make a bigger profit, but be ready to go to market much faster. Plus you get versatile and sleek designs alongside an easy to update platform. Now it’s up to your own due diligence in figuring out if you should hop on our Duda wagon or not.

Click here to see some samples of our small business templates. Each can be fully customized to your needs. or simply click the button below to start a conversation. We would be happy to provide a demonstration online or in person.