Setting up your business website
Having a good website is important. If you haven’t set yours up yet you could be missing out on potential new business and better engaging your existing customers. An effective, professional-looking website can showcase your business, build trust, help with customer retention and increase your sales.
But where do you start, what do you need to know, and how do you find the right solution for your business? Here are our six steps to getting started with your business website.
When you’re eager to establish your online presence it’s important to pause first and think about what you need from your website.
Will you be selling products? If so, your website will need to include ecommerce functionality. On the other hand, if your site is simply there to showcase your products and services, it might look and feel very different.
Is your product line small, or will your site need to include lots of information?
Understanding the purpose of your website will determine how much time and budget the project requires, as well as the tools you’ll use and even whether you think you’ll need professional help or not.
When you’ve decided what type of site you’ll be building – and what it is likely to look like – you’re now ready to take the incredibly important step of choosing your domain name.
Your domain is the address of your business online. It’s what your customers type in when they want to find you, it’s what the search engine shows when potential customers are looking, and if you choose to take advantage of email hosting, it’s also the part of your email address that goes after the @.
It’s the first thing that identifies you online, so it needs to be relevant. And it only costs a few pounds a year (our domain names start from £6.99 per year).
With the right domain name you can present the right image to your customers (and potential customers). A professional looking domain can help to build trust, quickly identify your business and distinguish you from your competition.
And you can’t have a website without a domain.
If you want to know if your preferred domain is available, or see your options, you can find your perfect domain name here.
Web hosting is a crucial component to setting up a business website (or any website for that matter). And just like you need a domain for your website, you also need hosting.
It provides the secure storage for your site and all its components (pages, images, videos, data, etc.), and is essentially what allows your users to access your content online.
Based on what you decide at step one, you should know the type of hosting package you need.
How large will your site be, for example, how many visitors are you expecting, and what type of content will be on the site (text, images, videos)? Other factors like speed, storage capacity and reliability are also important.
A basic package might be sufficient for a small site and a few email addresses, but if you’re planning on hosting video content or your site will be large and complex, a more fully fledged hosting package might be required.
There are lots of web hosting options, but here’s a link to our small business hosting packages, starting at £4.99 per month.
Will you be building your website yourself, or hiring in professional help?
If you are planning on doing it yourself, there are a host of commercial packages available to help. For basic websites, all our hosting packages include free website builder software. But more fully featured software might be better suited to more complex websites.
When you’re looking for the right tools, it’s worth checking to see if they provide some of the following:
WYSIWYG (‘what you see is what you get’) provides an easy to use interface, where text and images can be dropped in place and moved around the screen, meaning you can create a great looking page without having to know any code at all. If you’ve used Microsoft Publisher or other desktop publishing software, you’ll already be used to the concept of WYSIWYG.
Templates are great when you don’t know where to start. Just drop your content into the spaces provided, and have a professional looking website in no time.
Mobile optimisation is key. Most of your users will probably be accessing your site through their mobile devices, so building with those users in mind is imperative.
Ecommerce features are crucial if you’re selling through your website. Your chosen software might include this, or you can choose off the shelf services to integrate into your site (and remember you’ll also need a merchant account and means of collecting payment).
If you decide that do it yourself isn’t for you, you might choose to enlist professional help for the design, build and ongoing maintenance of your site. While this might take a considerable amount of work off your hands and (hopefully) guarantee a high quality website, bear in mind that this will likely be a much more costly option than building your own site.
Decide on your site structure. What pages do you think you’ll need, and what type of content will be on those pages? You’ll need a homepage, of course, but might want to also include a page (or pages) about your products, an ‘about us’ page, contact details and possibly even a blog.
When you know your site structure, all you need to do then is add some compelling content. Don’t overdo it though. Apart from on your blog, visitors aren’t likely to want to read long uninterrupted passages of text.
- Make sure your text is short, to the point, compelling, and broken up with relevant images (but again, don’t overdo the images – balance is important).
- If producing written content isn’t up your street (or you just don’t have the time to do it), you could consider finding a local freelancer (or even a content agency) to help – at an additional cost. Just remember the importance of providing a good brief to keep costs to a minimum (many freelancers and agencies will charge by the hour – so giving them everything they need to provide you with great content will save time and money for you).
- Make sure that your site structure is logical – that users can access the main parts of your site from the homepage, for example – and that all your links are working.
- And remember that bad spelling and grammar is probably the biggest – and most easily corrected – mistake of many small business websites. It really is important to proofread all your content before it is published.
Don’t worry about uploading all that content to your site, by the way. Instructions will be available from your hosting provider, and if you’re using some of the better-known online site building software it’ll probably do most of the work for you.
A successful website will be engaging for your customers, make it easy to find and access information, and communicate that information effectively.
When you’ve launched your website, don’t think of it as ‘job done’.
It’s important to understand how your customers (and potential customers) are engaging with you, and think about future improvements. Making sure your website shows up on Google (and other search engines) is also very important.
You can also use online tools to measure the success of your site (and even the individual pages on it).
But these are all topics for a future blog…
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