A Guest Post by Kenneth Sytian
These days, a business website is no longer a luxury. Having one is crucial to maintain your visibility online.
Customers use the internet for everything, including researching a product to looking up for a local business’s operating hours. Therefore, it is important that your business has an online presence.
However, building a website for your small business can be unnerving. Moreso if you do not have previous experience in web development and design.
The following steps will teach you the basics, and how you can create a website for your start-up this 2020.
1. Choose a Proper Domain Name
Your domain name is your website’s name and address. Ideally, you need to name your domain after your business’s name. That way, users can find it easily.
Then, check if that particular domain name is available. If it is already taken, you have two options:
- Add another word in your domain name. This can be the name of the city where your business is located. So, if your brick-and-mortar store is located in Brooklyn, NY, you can pick a domain name like www.yourbusinessbrooklyn.com.
- Contact the person who owns your desired domain. Ask them if he is willing to sell it. This can cost you a lot of money, so try to haggle your way through it.
If you are a start-up, stay away from more generic names and choose a domain that will best reflect your business.
Another thing to remember is to keep your domain name short and easy to remember. Exclude any extra words, especially if they are not part of the title of your actual business name.
Otherwise, customers will be frustrated if they have a hard time finding your website.
2. Choose Your Website Hosting Plan
After choosing the right domain name for your business, the next thing that you need to do is to find a reputable web hosting company, as it will connect your site to the internet.
Think of your site’s hosting company as your hard drive. If it falls through, then you will not have a website.
Depending on your budget and business needs, here are three of the most common types of web hosts:
- Shared or individual hosting: One of the most affordable plans out there, and is usually limited to a single domain. You are sharing space with other webmasters, and it is the best option if you just want a small website. Its features are a bit restrictive, though, with limited bandwidth and data storage.
- Dedicated Servers: This kind of web host is more expensive but it means that you do not need to share your server’s resources with other website owners. You can upgrade into a dedicated server is you are steadily experiencing growth in your individual hosting plan. If you are planning to scale your business, pick a server that allows you to transition your site to a dedicated server later on.
- Reseller Accounts: This allows you to have several individual plans in a single account. This is ideal if you are planning to run a couple of small sites.
3. Focus on Your Content
Content will always be king.
If you want to create a positive first impression with your web visitors, you need to realize the importance of content marketing.
As you gradually fill your site with valuable content, you will establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. This can help you organically gain customers eventually.
Keep in mind that having a well-maintained website is one that produces extremely engaging, informative and high-quality content.
As you grow and continuously provide valuable content, your site rankings will also improve. This can lead to better online visibility and improvement in sales for your business.
4. Construct a Layout
You need to map out a plan on how you can take customers to your website.
You probably heard about the CMS or Content Management System. In a nutshell, it is a dashboard that allows you to make new pages, publish blog posts, and add images on your site.
But before choosing a CMS that is right for your business, you also need to decide on the pages that you want to include on your site.
A typical website would have the following pages:
- Home
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Blog
The number of pages on your website will, of course, depend on the type of business that you have. If you are selling products, then that could mean that you will need an online store.
Regardless, it is imperative that you have a mobile-friendly site. Thus, it is important to carefully choose which CMS platform to use for your website:
- WordPress: One of the best platforms out there, and most sites used it mostly because of its beginner-friendly plugins and tools. It also allows advanced users to explore more.
- Joomla: Through Joomla, users can easily build and manage more dynamic websites. Great for e-commerce and membership sites.
- Drupal: Gives your site a perfect structure, although you need to have a basic understanding of HTML in order to publish content. Ideal for more experienced web developers.
4. Design Your Website
At Sytian Productions, a Philippines Web Design company, we always educate our clients on how a website serves as their business’s face online. Thus, regardless of the size of your business, it is important that you have a professional-looking site.
Here are a couple of things to consider when it comes to site design:
- Page layout: Adopt a clear and clean layout to avoid overcrowding your web content.
- Fonts that suit your brand: The style and size should be easy to read.
- Color scheme: The colors should perfectly complement your logo and should be aesthetically appealing.
- Multimedia content: A healthy variation of text, images, and videos can help engage your website, visitors.
5. Test and publish your site
Before your site goes live, make sure that you test it first on major browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
Go through every page, and check its features to ensure everything works perfectly. The same thing goes when checking how your website looks like on mobile.
You need to incorporate analytics into your site as well. Once you set this up, it is relatively easy for you to monitor your site performance and traffic.
The Bottomline
To create a website for your small business, you need to follow the steps that we have enumerated above.
There are also many resources out there that will help you accomplish this, and that includes professional web designers, website builders, and hosting providers.
Do this successfully, and you can easily grow your traffic, boost your online presence, and sales.
