1. Keep it simple

Use your website to tell potential customers important information about your business, and how to contact you.  Don’t add too many features or irrelevant information.

Don’t use too many different fonts or colours (I know, I know, look who’s talking).  To be really safe, pick one font that matches your logo or theme, and stands out a little, for headings.  Avoid Comic Sans unless you run a kindergarten, and avoid Papyrus unless you are James Cameron. (And even then, think twice about it.) Pick an easy-to-read font for general text.  

For keeping colours simple, choose one accent colour, and use it sparingly.  Keep everything else fairly monochrome.  (I’m having one of those ‘do as I say not as I do’ moments writing that.)

Spell check, and have someone else proofread.  The occasional mistake is human.  But, as your brain tends to miss your own typos it doesn’t hurt to have someone else take a look too. 

2. Make information clear for customers and search engines

If you are providing a location-dependent service, use your location along with your service, in the main heading of your site.  This helps search engines (and customers) understand where you are.

Include the basics of Who What When Where Why How for your business.

Who are you, What do you do, When do you do it (opening hours), Why do you do it (what problem are you solving), Where do you do it (Location), and How do you do your job? 

You don’t need to include every little detail, just enough to avoid confusion between similar businesses.

Tell potential customers about your unique selling point.  Why should they use you instead of your competitors?

3. Use Quality Images and Logos

Use a smaller number of good-quality images, rather than a lot of mediocre images.  Ensure your logos graphics and photos are the appropriate resolution.  Using overly compressed jpegs, or using images compressed by Facebook or other platforms, can make images look distorted and low quality.

4. Check your Website

Check that your website looks good on a range of mobiles, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers.  

Go to https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and enter your website’s URL.  Wait while your page is analysed and results generated, then review the results.

You won’t always be able to fix every issue, especially on a free site. But you can use it to identify easily fixable problems like insufficient contrast between text and background, or images without Alt text.

Aim to get 100% score on Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. 

Unless you have an exceptionally lite-weight site, you will probably need to do a lot of optimising, and maybe set up caching, to get to 100% speed on mobile. So don’t stress about that mobile speed score too much on a free site.  As long as it loads in a reasonable period of time so your customers don’t give up, it should be fine. 

5. Set up a Google Business Profile and include your location

Include all relevant information, and follow process for verification.  Add your website to your NZBN database entry.  You can also set up business pages on social media, and link them to your website.