When you’re ready to start showcasing your pattern designs, you may be considering creating a website. Is it necessary to create a website for your design business?

A website is a great tool for your business. Although some people may get by without one, I highly recommend creating one as a great way of showing your work and allowing people to connect with you.

Your website is as it’s a great place to show people who you are, what you do, what you sell or how you can help them.  It allows people to get to know, like and trust you.

What to include on your website

There are few things you should think about when creating your website.

Home page

This first important page is your homepage.

When someone lands on your home page you want them to be able to clearly see what it is that you do and how you can help them. Don’t make it fancy for the sake of it. You want it to really clearly communicate what it is that you do so that people will then want to click through and find out a little bit more information. If people land on your home page and it’s either difficult to navigate or they aren’t sure what you do, it’s easy for them to click away.

About page

An about page is also really important to include on your website. Include a photo of yourself on this page, if you feel comfortable in doing as it helps with connection. Let your readers know a bit about you, who you are, what it is that you do exactly, how you help people and what you create. Allow people to connect with you and find out a little bit more about you.

You really want your about page to be authentic so people can get a really great feel for who you are, so they can really connect with you.

Contact page

You also should include a contact page which will, of course, allow people a way of contacting. You can either use a contact submission form or alternatively you can add your email address.

If someone is interested in your work, product, working with or connecting with you, you want them to easily be able to do it.

Pattern/Portfolio page

Creating a portfolio page on your website will allow you to showcase some of your work.

You can do that either with two portfolio pages, one public and one private or you could have all of your designs public.

If you have separate pates, you can have samples of your work on one page and then if someone wanted to see more of your work you could give them access to a password protected portfolio page, with the rest of your designs on it. That means they would have to then contact you to view the private page.

Blog page

Another option is to include a blog on your website. Creating a blog is a great way of getting traffic to your website and you can that using tools such as Pinterest and using SEO strategically.

Using a blog post and Pinterest can be a really get way of getting free traffic to your website so creating a blog can be a really great strategy.

It will however take commitment and something that you need to do regularly.

Easy to use

You also want to make sure that your website is mobile friendly and is really clear and easy to use. There’s no use in having a super fancy website that people can’t navigate. You want them to be able to move around and find things easily. Don’t use really fancy names for the sake of it e.g keep the link to your homepage and about page etc. simple and easy to navigate. It’s better if it’s simple and people can find what it is that they’re looking for otherwise you risk people clicking away.

You also want to make sure that your website is easy to load. When you’re adding images, it’s a good idea to make sure that they’re small so they load quickly so compressing them before you upload them is a great idea. Tinyjpeg.com is a great site for compressing jpeg files.

Lastly, make sure you think about SEO (search engine optimization). That is thinking about keywords and making sure you include those on the backend of your website.

It’s really up to you whether you do want to create a website, but I think that it’s a really great and important tool to use as part of your design business.