What Makes A Great Business Website Template?

Make sure your website template has all the features to empower your business.

Starting your own online business is exciting and marks the beginning of something potentially amazing. You may even already have an existing company but haven‘t yet taken the online plunge. Either way, your business‘s future greatly depends on the website you plan to create. Unless you are a programmer and a designer, it is easier and more effective to choose a layout from existing website templates. Your website needs to look professional and be highly functional without bugs and problems.

So how do you choose a great template for your business website? Here’s what you should be looking for:

1. Visuals

Website templates need to visually match the service/product your business offers. For example, a photographer will require a completely different layout to a furniture shop. The quality of images you have is very important as well, as only high resolution images look good in big sizes. Here are some tips:

• Photographers should consider going big, bold and full screen. Show off your work with background images of your photographs. But, beware loading times! Not only do you need a great layout but a fast hosting provider too. A dedicated server hosting solution will provide you with ample resources to store and server large photographic files.

• Artists should create an online portfolio. This requires a template which has a good slider or lightbox gallery feature that contains thumbnails for faster loading and then full size images when clicking.
• Retailers need great eCommerce functionality. There are so many little touches, such as hovering on a cart icon and seeing how many items, or even which items, are in your cart. The checkout process itself needs to be smooth, perhaps even a one click checkout. Being able to create an account is a great feature, as is an attractive display of the products with wish lists and rating possibilities.
• Informative service websites not only need to attractively display information, they need to be engaging, perhaps newspaper-like or magazine-like.
• Overall colour schemes can determine what message you‘re sending to your visitors. Select website templates which give you a range of colours to choose from, and allow you to experiment. Perhaps you could do an A/B test and send half of your visitors to one version and half to another – this will provide you with a fully informed decision.

2. Functionality

There is nothing worse than searching for something online, finding exactly what you‘re looking for, only to discover the website you end up on doesn‘t work properly. This gives off all of the wrong signals and your potential customers will divert their attentions – and their money – to your competitors.

Your website template needs to work without any bugs, so be careful where you download it. The UK2’s Website Builder provides stunning, fully functional templates to choose from with your hosting package. Have a look, we think investing in quality at great prices is unbeatable.

3. Responsive Design

As a whole, the online user tendency nowadays is to make more and more purchases on mobile devices rather on our home computers. We are constantly on the go, and buy, sell and book while on the move. As you may know, it’s difficult to use a normal website on a mobile-sized screen. The text is hardly legible as it is tiny, you keep having to zoom in and out, and navigation becomes unusable. Sometimes regular websites don‘t even work properly on tablets and other devices. This is a very negative message from your business, so make sure the website template you choose is responsive – this means it adapts to the device it is being accessed on.

4. SEO Optimisation

The way a website is designed and how the individual pieces are connected is important to search engine rankings. Keep this in mind when choosing a website template in the UK or internationally. Look at the urls and how they connect with each other, how the subcategories link to the main pages, and of course all the meta tags will have to be filled in once your template is downloaded. A good template allows you to edit these rather than try to edit the code manually.

Build your website today with UK2’s Website Builder tool, or open the doors to your online shop with Online Shop Builder, the ultimate tool for building seamless eCommerce websites.