Why and how to building a website for your business? As a leading website development company in USA and India, we describe it here. A huge part of any business’s success is having a strong online presence. Yet, the process of creating your own website from scratch may seem quite daunting. Even though you, as a small business owner, have already endured many new beginnings in your exciting (yet often rocky) journey to bringing your vision to life, you still are looking for guidance to ease this process.
There are loads of benefits to creating your own website. Whether it be for business, fun or as a hobby, there is a space on the web for your site to thrive and become popular in it’s own right.
If you are looking to build a new small business website or revamp your existing one, here is a detailed guide to help you through the process.
1. PURCHASE AN EFFECTIVE DOMAIN NAME
You probably spent a lot of time and effort in finalizing your small business’s name. Your business’s domain name requires similar if not more thought behind it.
Make it simple and concise
Ensure your domain name clearly states your business’s name and avoids any kinds of slang and difficult to pronounce or type words. Similarly, it is best to keep the domain name short and effective so it’s easy to remember.
Use the correct domain extension
When in doubt about which extension to use, also do your research to consult experts. But as a general rule, businesses are best represented by the .com extension as opposed to .net or .co. A country-specific domain is advisable if it makes sense for your business to attend only to customers from that country.
Avoid alphanumeric characters
Adding numbers to your domain could make it more complex and difficult to remember. The same goes with the usage of special characters like exclamation marks and hyphens.
Research the domain name
There exists a deluge of websites on the internet. So, it is very probable that the domain name you have in mind is already taken. Hence, it is advised to conduct the research early on so as to avoid any wastage of time and effort. This is also important for the cost of the domain since domains that are already taken will have to be purchased from the owner.
2. SELECT A WEB HOST THAT IS SECURE, SCALABLE AND SUIT YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS
In order to create your website, you need a place to host that website of yours. This is where web hosting providers come to aid. These service providers will give you space on their powerful servers to host your website and let people from around the world access your website.
Web hosting companies offer a range of services, often bundled together in packages or plans. Hence, a small business owner will have to make a mindful decision about which plan best suits their business needs.
Web host companies have plans ranging from a ‘shared server’ to a ‘dedicated server’.While the shared server plan could different by various companies, it would typically mean that your business will be sharing a server with other businesses. This could have problems like inadequate website performance and security issues.
A dedicated server will be more expensive but is the best option for optimal site performance since an entire server machine will be dedicated to only your website. This means you enjoy the benefits of optimal performance, tailored services, less downtime, enhanced security, and dedicated support services from your web host. However, the cost of a dedicated server could be significantly higher and could be unfeasible for small businesses that are just starting out.
You can take the middle route and opt for a virtual private server (VPS). Such a server is typically one machine partitioned to function as multiple servers. In most cases, very few servers are hosted on a single node, hence you can enjoy better reliability, scalability, and stability than a shared host. Moreover, you will also benefit from increased performance and security as a VPS is similar to a dedicated server but at a lower cost.
No matter which route you take, it is crucial to ensure that you receive support services so that problems could be quickly resolved. Most web hosting companies today have seamless and easy-to-understand server consoles. A server console is essentially the server interface where you can access your server and make changes if required. A seamless server console is essential for a small business as they are less likely to be able to hire a dedicated server administrator.
Lastly, give all the required attention to security details. Your web host should enable you to access your server via a secure file transfer protocol (SFTP), add necessary SSL certificates, and have regular backups. Some popular web hosting companies are GoDaddy, SiteGround, and DreamHost.
3. CHOOSE A PLATFORM FOR YOUR WEBSITE
Building a website used to be difficult. If you want your own website, you would have to start building it from scratch, which requires an expert level of coding skills. Or you would have to hire a web designer to build it for you, which could be quite expensive. Luckily, that’s not the case anymore.
There are a number of website builders on the market that allow you to easily build a website in no time. But not all website builders are created equally. And with so many to choose from, how do you know which website builder is best for you?
4. CHOOSE A PLATFORM FOR YOUR WEBSITE
Before getting to site customization, you need to have some content on your site.
After all, it’s hard to customize your site when there’s nothing on it to show the changes. What you need in terms of content will vary depending on the subject matter of your site and your goals.
However, there are a few key pages that nearly every site has:
● Homepage
● About page
● Contact page
In deciding which pages to add, consider what information would be most helpful to your visitors. You’ll also need to think about visual content, such as photos.
5.MAKE SURE YOU’RE MOBILE FRIENDLY
It’s no secret that more and more people are using their mobile devices for browsing the web these days. To ensure your user experience is as smooth and intuitive on mobile as it is on desktop, make sure to invest time in perfecting your mobile website. In fact, this crucial detail is one of the top design tips for achieving a professional site. When building a website from scratch, take care about a mobile-friendly version of your site. Focusing on readability and navigation, you can incorporate impressive mobile features like animation and an intuitive mobile menu.
6. MAKE YOUR WEBSITE SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY
Search engine optimization is a set of practices that help your website rank higher in search engines. In a space where there are millions of business websites, sometimes even in the same field, without SEO your website will be most certainly lost in the crowd. The following SEO practices can help your website perform better than your competitors on search engines.
Meaningful keyword planning and usage
This includes using search keywords relevant to your business at various places in your website like homepage, blog, or URL.
Fast loading speed
Search engines like Google often penalize websites with slow loading speeds. Hence, it is important to ensure that your website graphics are optimized, you have optimal website codes in place, etc. A fast-loading website is also important for visitor retention as no one likes a website that takes forever to load.
Add meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are the short descriptions that appear below your URL on search engines. This informs the search engines about what your website is about. A meta description rich with quality keywords can help your website rank better and enhance the click-through rate.
Security
SSL is the standard security technology that ensures data passed between web servers and browsers remains private. This is crucial for your business’s credibility and trustworthiness and ensuring safe and secure transactions on the website.
Other practices
Some other SEO practices include having backlinks and internal. Backlinks are your website links existing on external websites. Internal links are the links existing in different pages on your own website, linking them together. Adding links to your social media accounts will help you generate traffic from those sources and increase your click-through rate.
Things to avoid
● Stuffing pages with keywords
● Copying content from other websites or using AI to create website content.
● Cloaking – this is essentially a sly practice of hiding text in the HTML code of the website.
● Thin content – having similar content on various pages of your website.
7. EMBRACE SOCIAL MEDIA
Take advantage of social media marketing by encouraging your site visitors to share your content across social networks. It’s easy, free and an effective way to spread your name across the World Wide Web. To ensure this, add a social bar to your site that’s highly visible and correctly linked to all of your pages. We suggest displaying the bar either in the menu, the footer, or as an anchor on the side. You can pin the element to the screen so that it stays fixed and on-show as visitors scroll.
8. TRACK WEB PERFORMANCE
In order to see whether your SEO efforts are working, it’s important to track your website performance and traffic with the help of analytics tools like Google Analytics, Bing webmaster tools, or other analytics. These tools can help you track the following information about your website;
Website traffic
Daily, monthly, and yearly visitors and the number of views on the various pages on your website.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. Hence a lower bounce rate means that more visitors are spending more time on your website and viewing more than one page. A lower bounce rate also enhances your website’s SEO performance.
Most engaging keywords
Analytics tools will give you information about the keywords that lead the most visitors to your website. This can help you understand the themes that work and leverage on that information.
Crawl errors
These are the errors that the search engines find on your website in crawling its content such as broken links or errors in codes.
Overall visitor behavior
This includes information such as the sources from which your visitors are arriving (social pages, external websites etc), which pages they spend the most time on, activity on various pages (CTA buttons, comments, etc). Such information can help you make data-driven decisions and help you improve your website performance.
Congratulations, now you are a proud owner of your website
By reading this article, you must have realized that building a great business website for your business is not as simple as expected, However, you could Do it Yourself (DIY) by following the guidelines shared in this article. Alternatively, you could hire website design agency to assist you in building a professional website.