Building a Minnesota professional website is just like building a website anywhere else. If it’s for a local business, then you might want to add a little Minnesota flare to the page to show support, but other than that, the same basic website building concepts apply everywhere. Page loading speed, ease of use, navigation, and proper optimization are all key components of the website building process.

Building a professional website for a business takes a little more care than the average blog. You’ll want to own your full domain and it’s best to be hosted from a dedicated server. Whether you’re building a Minnesota professional website or an website in Alabama, here are a few universal pointers to keep in mind.

Pages Need To Load Quickly.

Fast loading times has always been a hot-button issue for professional website design. It’s become even more important since the rise of mobile technology. People on their smart phones want pages to load even faster than when they are at home. It’s a side-effect of a culture that you must deal with as website designer or business owner.

A loading time more than 6 seconds is almost guaranteed to scare away any visitors. That number is an absolute maximum and you really want to be not even half of that. A recent estimate revealed businesses losing around 1.2 billion dollars total from slow pages alone. Pages that load slow cause users to leave and when people leave, you lose money.

SEO Is Non-Negotiable.

Search engine optimization(SEO) might seem like a good idea, but really it’s more than that. More than 90 percent of website traffic comes from a search engine. Ignoring SEO is like ignoring 90 percent of your website’s potential. There’s no simply no avoiding it if you want to build a successful, long-term website.

Today, SEO seems overshadowed by newer techniques, such as social media marketing(SMM). Although it seems like these are competing fields of marketing, they actually complement one another very nicely. As a matter of fact, SEO works nearly perfectly with most forms of marketing, from PPC to video marketing. Every page of every domain should be optimized for search engines.

Website Navigation Should Be Simple.

Website navigation affects two things: the user’s experience and the search engine’s ranking. People want to move quickly through your site. Google also wants to move quickly through the site as it is indexed and ranked. To accomplish this, a proper site map and navigational buttons are required.

Almost all important elements of a website can be connected back to the theme of navigation on some level, whether it’s the URL, the content, or the layout. It all needs to work together and be easy to use.

If you want to be sure your navigation is up-to-par, then try sticking with standard techniques. This means all pages should be accessible with less than four clicks from any given page.

The main navigation buttons should be aligned vertical on the left side of the page or aligned horizontal at the top of the page. This is where people naturally look when they want to navigate. Putting the buttons elsewhere might seem like a smart style choice, but it can be a costly mistake.

Tried And True Still Works.

Technology, particularly the internet, is rapidly changing. There is always a new marketing strategy or design technique around the corner. However, the tried and true techniques, such as those discussed above, remain relevant to this day and likely won’t fade out of style anytime soon.