A comprehensive guide to building a business website

In this digital age, businesses that are reluctant to embrace digitization risk being eliminated in this competitive sphere today. A sizeable consumer group not limited to the rising Gen X and millennials rely on the internet to search for products, store locations and reviews on them. The website you build does not have to be exceptional or complicated. Just a simple and user-friendly site can help open new doors to an untapped pool of potential consumers. All this can be achieved without needing to sink in big sums of money and long hours.

Putting together a simple website for your business is no rocket science. In fact, there are multiple services out there on the net which allows business owners to create a website without needing any proficiency in coding and web programming. Regardless of the web program you are using, there are some basic principles to guide you in building your site which will aid you greatly. Here are the guiding tips to keep in mind:

1. Ascertain the main purpose of your website

Ask yourself what you plan to achieve with your site. Effective business websites fulfill the purposes of their creation, be it providing more information about their trade to consumers or a call-to-action for consumers. The most critical thing about this step is to convey what your business hopes to solve and provide for your target consumers. Most consumers do not have the patience or tolerance to seek out what they are looking for if they are unable to do so within a few clicks.

The key idea is to build your website around the user experience, which is basically users’ ease of navigation of your site. Regardless of what your site’s goals are, the information provided to consumers to achieve these goals must be accessible and easy to spot. Lastly, your messaging and the tone in which the information is conveyed should be consistent and reiterated throughout the site.

2. Choose a domain name wisely

A name speaks volumes about your website. You would want to use a catchy and memorable URL for your customers to remember at the top of their minds, but also professional enough so that your business will be taken seriously. A word of advice would be to keep it succinct and avoid all abbreviations, acronyms, and numbers to save your consumer any trouble down the road.

The next step would be to determine your top-level domain (TLD), the suffix at the end of your URL. Nontraditional TLD names are gaining popularity and can be used if it aligns with your business’ branding. Otherwise, common TLD names like .com, .net, and others will work fine as well.

Finally, after you have decided on a domain name, make sure that it is not already taken. Get it purchased on a domain registrar like GoDaddy, Squarespace or Wix. Take caution to ensure that you are not infringing on any copyrights. Consider contacting the said company for the desired URL and purchase it from them.

3. Selecting a suitable web host

A ‘host’ server helps to store data for the public to access. Hosting your own website is out of the question due to the exorbitant costs, so we would advise you to get your site hosted externally.

There are two options to go about this. The more cost-savvy one would be to share a server with other sites through a shared web host. The costlier option would be a private server or hosting, which exposes your site to slow loading times due to other sites.

Before you decide on any host, be sure to do your research and contact hosts like Hosting Foundry to get a better understanding of their service offerings, locations, and reliability. A measure of trustworthiness and capability of the service would be how they approach and answer your queries with the other tools and supplements at their disposal.  

Moving forward, it is also important for you as a business owner to regularly monitor your web traffic and the overall user experience for you to make prudent decisions when you decide to renew or switch to a new web host.

4. Creating other pages

As mentioned above, users do not have the capacity to spend time searching for information they are seeking out; especially if the content is not accessible within several clicks and also if it is hard to spot. This means you need to organize your information properly and cohesively in pages and make sure that they are linked properly and are accessible. This organization of information by building pages dedicated to conveying information specific to different aspects is important such that consumers can easily spot critical information; such as your product information or store location. An “ About Us” page is also great to establish credibility and trustworthiness by putting real names and faces to your business.

Pay extra attention to your landing page as it is the first touchpoint many potential customers have with your business. Be concise and consistent in your copy and tone throughout your site. Do not forget to utilize call-to-actions to direct your site visitors to the next step of their decision-making process. Lastly, consider spending a little on professionally taken photos instead of opting for stock photos to be used on your site as they diminish the overall trustworthiness of your brand.

5. Testing and debugging

Once you have completed the steps above, your site should be shaping up and ready to go live. Before you do that though, you should test your site out on different platforms - mobile, desktop, tablets and different web clients. Make sure they are multi-platform optimized. Also, flag any errors with navigating your site and get them fixed. Lastly, link your site to an analytics program, which will be extremely insightful in guiding your future marketing efforts and decisions to further expand your business, based on the data collected.

6. Promote and maintain

After your website is live, make sure they are connected to social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others to maximize your reach. Social media outlets help your brand to maintain open communications with your customers and put out content to help engage them.

Submitting your site to search portals will also help web traffic and overall leads. Further refinements you can make is to ensure your site is search engine optimized, which can help push up your site’s organic search rankings. Utilize relevant keywords wisely together with a focus on SEO are key to conquering the search engines and secure leads.

Lastly, make sure to update your site with new content frequently and ensure that the site’s back-end and security are all up-to-date.

Conclusion

Although a business website sounds tough and time-consuming to build, it requires little capital, which is a fair trade-off. In fact, the reach it gives your brand and business can be exceptional if you meet all the tips and requirements; it even beats traditional marketing efforts. If your brand still does not have a website, now is definitely time to build one!