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5 Important Steps To Building A Small Business Website
Whatever type of small business you’re running, building a website is an excellent factor in your company’s success. You can refer to the expertise of a webmaster to create a captivating and remarkable business website. Certainly, you’ll want to achieve a good online presence to attract more customers to the market.
Business Website 101
If you want to create a website for your newly established business or you have an existing website requiring enhancement, you can follow these simple steps to help you launch a competitive business website:
1. Know The Purpose Of Website
The first thing to do is to figure out the purpose of your website. Before even thinking about your business website’s design or domain name, answer the question of what goal would you be aiming for making your website. Figuring out the vision of your business website is essential as it’ll direct you on how to start a website business.
One of your overall goals should be to provide quality content for your consumers by featuring your brand and image. However, it shouldn’t be too advertising as what your consumers want is to learn valuable information from your content.
For instance, if your business is providing legal services, you may want to tackle the importance of hiring a lawyer or the reasons why one will need a lawyer and other related information blogs about law, lawsuits, and the like. With such, you should design your website both having visual and written content to showcase your business’s brand.
Besides, you may want to build a website to make your business have an online presence. Effective online presence isn’t only applicable for big businesses, but small businesses need it more since it’s a crucial element, especially you’re now competing in a digitally-minded market.
One of the effective methods of introducing your business to the market is through a website. It’s also through it that you can reach out to new potential customers. Your site should contain the ‘About’ page as well as the ‘Contact’ page. After, you can include anything you find relevant.
2. Choose And Register Domain Name
Next is deciding what your domain name should be because it plays an important role in serving as your address on the web. Without it, you can’t establish a website and you can’t acquire visitors. If you want to achieve brand trust, you must choose a good domain name. Doing so will also help your business achieve a higher sales conversion.
After choosing a domain name, you should then register it to improve your online integrity. It also helps for building your brand identity. When you process your domain name registration, you must also register other pertinent domain extensions like .org and .net. This will also serve as your protection against competitors who want to imitate your brand identity. Thus, it’s rational to say selecting your domain name and its registration is the most crucial part when you build a website.
It’s easy to register your domain name. Here’s how you can do it:
- You can find many domain name registrar companies, and all you have is to choose your provider.
- After choosing your provider, visit their website and confirm the availability of a domain name through their Domain Name Search portion.
There are instructions on how you can proceed with the registration, including paying for the registration. In this way, you can claim it, and no one will be able to use it unless they bid for it.
3. Find A Web Host
For you to launch your website, you’ll need a host. A web host is a server storing data for the public to easily access anytime. You can host your business website, but it can be impractical for a small business like yours since it’ll naturally involve big expenses. For a small business, you may want to use an external host.
For a small business, you may want to use an external host. Utilizing web hosts for small businesses ensures that the hosting solution is tailored to your needs, providing features and support designed specifically for entrepreneurial ventures. It’s a strategic way to optimize your online presence without breaking the bank.
Considering your budget, you’ll have these two options for your web host:
- Shared Web Host
It’s quite affordable, but as its name implies, you’ll share the server with other websites.
- Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is more costly than the shared web host. But the great thing about it is you’ll get a private server, which means no other websites share yours.
If you prefer to use free web hosting services, you should realize there isn’t free hosting. These so-called free web hosting providers are incorporating other methods to somehow charge you. They may fill in banner ads on your business website to make amends for the free web hosting, making it load slow. You’re making a website for your business, so you wouldn’t want your potential customers to leave your site because it takes too long to load.
4. Choose The Best CMS
As mentioned, you’ll also need to post content on your business website, so there’d be a need for a content management system (CMS) to manage your digital content. When you choose the best CMS, you’ll have a better way of maintaining your website, but what’s important is to have an affordable, user-friendly, and extensible one. In this way, you can properly create and post content without much difficulty.
5. Design A Captivating User Interface
Most importantly, design your website like a pro. This means you should take into account the website’s user interface.
The user interface doesn’t only refer to the menus and buttons. Instead, it refers to the interaction of the user and the device or application. Often, this interaction involves multiple users, so when you design for the user interface, you shouldn’t only focus on the presentation of the product. It’ll help if you put more value on how your product works.
It isn’t just choosing vibrant colors and arranging the buttons and menus, but finding the best tools necessary for the task. For instance, make your website vibrant, but choose colors resonating with your business or defining various elements. You’d also need to use color-coding to differentiate the functions of buttons on your website.
For example, blue for ‘Save’ and red for ‘Delete.’ By using such, your customers will quickly know which buttons to use. On the other hand, if your website has only black and white, then they may find it hard to know which button is for what function.
Conclusion
As a small business owner, it’s now essential to build a website. Building a good online platform will help you enhance your brand identity while generating more potential customers. You might even be surprised some of your customers are from various parts of the world.
Thus, building a website is your way to grow your target audience and become known globally, so when building a website, don’t forget the key steps above. What’s even better is to work with a website builder, so you can focus on developing your business while taking care of your website needs to help you achieve your goals.