How To Create A Small Business Website

Read the quick and easy guide to creating a small company website. help walk you through crucial design choices, useful tools, and how to launch your site.

How To Make a Website: A Step-by-Step Guide to Get You Going

Your website is the most powerful sales and marketing tool in your arsenal. In five stages, you can design a stunning personal or commercial website that attracts visitors and entices them to collaborate with you. Here’s how you get started.

• Pick a Domain Name

A domain is your website’s unique name.

You can choose any name you like, but it’s preferable if it fits your business or professional name. This not only ensures that your branding is consistent, but it can also have a huge impact on how you appear in search results. A decent domain name may help you rank better in searches, increasing the number of visitors who click to visit your site.

While you’re pondering domain names, notice these useful tips:

• Include keywords relevant to your business to boost your visibility in search engines.
  Ensure it’s easy to spell.
• If you have trouble brainstorming, use a domain name generator as a jumping off point.
• Keep your domain short to make it easier for visitors to remember.
• Avoid abbreviations, acronyms, hyphens and numbers.
• Aim to use traditional top-level domains, or TLDs, such as .com or .net or one that best relates to you or your business.
• Make sure no one else is already using it. While you can purchase a domain from someone else, this can get expensive. You may be better off picking another name or using a different top-level domain, like .net, instead.

Register Your Domain and Pick Your Design and Hosting Providers

Once you’ve chosen a domain name, you’ll need to register it with a domain registrar. You can do this through a website such as Domain.com or Network Solutions. Keep in mind that these vendors just register the name for you, which may cost between $10 and $20 per year, depending on the TLD.

You’ll still need to locate another provider to host the URL where you’ll develop your website and possibly use a different tool to design it. To make things easier, you can register your domain with a provider that includes registration, hosting, and design services.

If you don’t have much or any coding skills, you might prefer an all-in-one platform like WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix. If you decide to utilize separate firms for web hosting and design, seek for a hosting service that provides benefits like tech assistance, a free domain name, or a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate.

SSL certificates are a global security standard that secures connections and protects your and your visitors’ data and sensitive information. This security precaution prefixes a website’s URL with HTTPS. Search engines and visitors like it. These features are more frequent with all-in-one providers, but not always, so be sure your package offers them.

The popular web hosts with and without design integrations are Bluehost, Dream Host, GoDaddy, and InMotion. Unless your site host offers integration, Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud are good third-party design solutions. Create designs on various platforms and incorporate them into your website.

If your web provider does not offer integration features, you may want to utilize Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud services. These services allow you to create designs and embed them on your website’s pages.

• Add Useful Pages and Engaging Content

When it comes to organizing content about your business and its services, you have a lot of alternatives. That being stated, try to include these vital sections on your website:

• A stunning homepage: The major center of your business website should capture visitors and explain exactly what you do and who you serve. Use eye-catching images, readable typefaces, succinct and clear descriptions, and compelling calls to action.
• An informative ‘About Us’ page: Share the origin story of your company. Highlight your accomplishments, goals, and values. You can also introduce any team members to build stronger relationships with consumers.
• Booking or shop page: Drive more revenue and integrate a third-party online scheduling platform or an e-commerce platform, such as HoneyBook or WooCommerce.
• An accessible contact page: Include social media accounts, emails, phone numbers, addresses, and a contact form so that people may easily contact you. If it matches your business, include your operating hours as well.
• Memorable content: Sharing fascinating information promotes you as an industry authority and contributes to the growth of your company’s devoted network. This could include blog posts, videos, podcast episodes, case studies, and more. As a bonus, this content may help improve your ranking in search results and increase site visitors.
• A robust FAQ page: Giving answers to common questions not only helps build more trust with your brand, but it may also reduce the number of calls and support tickets you receive.
• Testimonials and press coverage: Boost your credibility by sharing your successes. Create a page that shares positive reviews about your services and include any mention of your business in notable media outlets.

Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving your company’s website so that its pages appear higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), most notably Google. It’s what allows folks to locate you.

As you construct your website, keep these fundamental SEO strategies in mind to boost your visibility and drive more traffic.

• Use relevant phrases, called keywords, throughout your posts and pages. Don’t use keywords just for the sake of them, though. Make sure your choices are intentional. Overuse may negatively impact your ranking.
• Consistently publish valuable content for your customers or readers.
• Perform routine content audits or cleanups to see what you can consolidate or refresh.
• Keep your website’s loading speed as low as possible by optimizing images or enabling browser caching. These tweaks can help your webpage rank higher in search engine results. You can measure your page speed on GTmetrix. (Learn more about the importance of webpage loading speed.)
• Ensure your design and content work properly on computers, mobile phones and tablets. Do not underestimate your website’s performance on mobile devices. Up to half of web traffic now comes from smartphones.

It’s fantastic to have a well-designed business website, but search engines want to see more to establish your authority when indexing it in their search results.

When optimizing your website for search, keep your visitors in mind. You’ll want to use simple navigation techniques and create pages that load quickly. To accommodate a wide range of user abilities, adopt Section 508 requirements to make your website as accessible as possible.

• Review Your Site Before You Hit ‘Publish’

Before you launch your website into the real world, you need test it to ensure it functions properly. Among other things, ensure that you:

• Read through your content to ensure everything is accurate and error-free.
  Check for any broken links.
• Remove any filler content from your website theme or template.
• Test your website across browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and more.
• Connect your website to Google Analytics to monitor its performance.

When you’re ready, click the publish button. To increase traffic to your newly launched website, share it with friends, market it to clients, and put it on your LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media sites.

• Keep Your Site Up to Date

You’re not finished with your site the moment you hit publish. To retain top search rankings and improve your visitors’ experience, you must continuously update your website. Consider including the following on your webmaster to-do list:

• Use webmaster and analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to monitor how people use your site. Some website engagement metrics to track include bounce rates, click-through rates and average session duration.
• Regularly update your website with blog posts, products and promotional offers.
• Perform monthly reviews to ensure all aspects of your website, including internal and external links, pages and plug-ins, are working as intended.
• Update your “About Us” page with new team members or achievements.

As time passes, you may wish to develop ties with other company websites in order to establish reputation and boost your SEO. When other prominent websites connect to yours, search engines perceive your site as more credible and deserving of higher rankings in the results.

FAQs

• Do businesses really need a website?

Yes, all businesses should have a website. Even if you do not intend to sell online, a website is an important part of marketing since it allows people to learn more about you online, which can lead to offline sales.

• How much does a website cost to make?

Websites for normal small enterprises, personal usage, or portfolios can cost anywhere from zero to $20,000 up front—or more in some situations. Final and ongoing expenses are determined by your web hosting package, add-ons, design, SEO, and other adjustments. The average small business website costs between $4,000 and $10,000.

• Should I build my website or pay someone else to do it?

If you have a large budget and don’t want to handle any design or technical issues yourself, it may be beneficial to employ a designer. Otherwise, you can build your own website with beginner-friendly platforms such as WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace.

• How much does it cost to upgrade a website?

Each company charges a different amount to upgrade a website. Generally, you will have to pay for a domain name, which can typically be purchased for $12 to $60 per year on a website like GoDaddy. The simpler and easier to remember the domain name, the more expensive you can expect it to be. Upgrading to Wix’s Pro plan will cost $23 per month (billed annually), while upgrading to Weebly’s Professional plan will cost $16 per month (or $12 per month if billed annually).

• Is it possible to make a free website?

Yes, you can establish a website for free. Granted, most platforms that provide a free site either use a subdomain or display third-party adverts, both of which make a business website quickly appear amateurish. However, they can be an excellent option to create a website without incurring any upfront costs.

• How do I buy a domain name?

A domain registrar service allows you to easily search for available domains. Once you’ve decided on one, the provider will guide you through the checkout process and explain how to connect your domain to your website.

Source: Forbes ADVISOR