When you are planning to build a website for business, a generic template won’t do. You don’t want potential customers to be put off by how unprofessional your website looks!

Besides, you have to customize your website to account for the kind of customers you plan to attract. If you’re a legal firm or a bank, for example, then your website has to look conservative and somber. If you’re aiming to sell to teenage customers, you’ll need a fun and colorful design.

So how exactly do you personalize your website? Here are some tips that can help:

1. Do your research. This isn’t as hard to do as you may think. Even your website can help, as you can feature a popup survey so you can get accurate data from actual website visitors.

Of course, it does take a bit of strategizing to make sure your popup survey isn’t annoying. Maybe you can with their age, or with their gender. If there’s one thing you want to know about your website visitors, ask them about it.

Maybe you can pose more interesting questions to get the data you need so you can encourage your website visitors to participate. You can also feature quizzes in your website that can give you answers you want.

2. Design your web communications to be more personal. You know how restaurant patrons and hotel guests like it when the employees greet them by name? You can do that too at least with your emails by greeting them with their first name.

You can also track where the website visitor is when they use your app, and so you can feature a home screen that’s local to their area to make them feel more comfortable.

3. Enable a live chat feature. A lot of people would rather use the live chat feature than call your company for questions and clarifications. Sure, your website visitors may not use the live chat feature at first, but it’s always a nice gesture and you make them feel better when they know that this feature is available.

The live chat feature helps to explain many things about your products and services and about your industry in general. Your industry may be a bit too technical or esoteric, and you may be using a lot of unfamiliar terms. You may want to have your chat support personnel trained to answer questions and to clarify subjects that many newbies may find hard to understand.

Remember, it’s not just about the products and services you offer. It’s about giving your website visitors a positive experience when they browse your web pages. So it’s not enough that you feature a FAQ section and a blog to provide information. You also need to design your website in such a way that will make potential customers like and respect your brand. You have to accommodate their preferences and needs—in a way, they’re your needs as well.