A Great Small Business Website
A great small business website can be used to deliver basic information about your firm or as a straight e-commerce platform. A website not only helps small businesses promote and sell their products and services, but it also helps them stand out from the competition, which is especially important for clients who rely extensively on the Internet to learn everything they can about a firm. There are three types of web design: static, dynamic, or CMS, E-mail marketing, and e-commerce. The type of website design chosen is determined by the type of business and the needs of the entrepreneurs. Each of these sites will be created and developed using a variety of platforms.
- Best Website Small Business Builders
- Wix is the best website builder for small businesses.
- Square space is ideal for establishing a brand.
- Go Daddy — For organizations who need to be online rapidly, this is the best option.
- Weebly is the most cost-effective option.
- Zyro is the best option for business fundamentals.
- Duda is the best option for web design companies.
Wix is a free website builder that includes a Wix domain. Get a personalized domain name to instantly look more professional online. It gives your brand more legitimacy and makes it easier for people to locate you online.
In today’s digital age, a small business must have a website to generate revenue. You’ll lose a lot, if not all, of your potential revenue if you don’t have a website since customers won’t be able to discover anything about you or your company’s offerings if you don’t have one.
A great small business website build in 9-steps
- Select the best website builder for your needs.
- Choose a plan that meets your demands and fits your budget.
- Pick a domain name that is both unique and appropriate.
- Select a design template that you like.
- Make changes to the template’s design.
- Create your own content and format it.
- Select and install programmers.
- Test and preview your website.
- Make your website available on the internet.
10 Key Steps To Building A Great Small Business Website
- Obtain a suitable domain name
Your domain name, often known as your internet address, is frequently the first thing visitors see when they visit your site. It is critical that it makes a good first impression for both usability and search engine optimization considerations (SEO).
- Purchase a scalable, secure website hosting plan with excellent technical support
A website host (also known as a website hosting provider) is a business that provides the technology and services required to access a website on the internet. You link your domain name to your hosting account so that when people type in your website address, they are taken to the website you have stored on your server.
Depending on the technology and support you choose, hosting services might cost anywhere from $2 to $100+ each month. When you buy a yearlong plan instead of a monthly one, you usually get a discount.
- Display a clear description of your company prominently
It’s critical to let people know who you are and what you do right away on your small company website so they don’t get lost. Make sure your main homepage banner (also known as a “hero picture”) and subsequent banners are visual representations of your services, as well as a text snippet towards the top of the page that conveys who you are and what you do.
- Use the best content management system available
A content management system (CMS) is a piece of software that allows you to produce and manage digital material. You don’t need much technical skills to use a solid CMS to help you maintain your site. You should select a CMS that is tailored to your specific requirements; different systems are utilized for various reasons, including user-friendliness, extensibility, and cost.
The following are some well-known systems, along with summaries of their advantages and disadvantages.
Word Press is the most widely used content management system in the world. It offers a large, active support community and a plethora of useful plugins to enhance your site’s functionality. (And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, it’s simple to hire a Word Press developer to create one for you!) Word Press is also free and straightforward to set up. Most website developers are familiar with it, so finding someone or an agency to work on your site shouldn’t be difficult. Because of its versatility and extensibility, I usually recommend that small businesses utilize Word Press to build their websites.
It should be mentioned, however, that Word Press’s main flaw is security—hackers target it the most since it is so popular. Your WordPress site must be updated and secured on a regular basis to avoid being hacked. Furthermore, because it is difficult to secure every third-party plugin, maintaining the security of your Word Press site must be a continuous effort involving multiple best practices (checking to see if your plugins have been updated within the past few months, making sure it is a plugin provided in the official Word Press repository, deleting unused plugins immediately, etc.).
Drupal is a well-known content management system. It has many of the same advantages of WordPress, including as flexibility, ease of use, and a large community of users. It is more secure than WordPress (less vulnerable to criminal behavior), but it lacks the same number of plugin and theme possibilities, making it less expandable. The White House website (Whitehouse.gov) used Drupal for a long time before switching to WordPress, which it still uses today.
- Select an appropriate e-commerce platform
You’ll need the correct technology if you want to sell items and/or services through your website. (If you don’t already sell anything, you should think about it because e-commerce could help you improve your profits.) If you want consumers to be able to do financial transactions with you online, you’ll need to pick the correct platform for your business.
- Create a user interface for your website that is interesting, memorable, and engaging
Make sure the UX of your small company website creates a great first impression that leads to conversions. You can do so by following the guidelines below:
- Make use of eye-catching images and legible typefaces.
- Check to see if your graphics have been compressed and optimized for quick loading. Search engines, such as Google, will penalize your rating if your website is slow.
- Examine your competitors’ websites to see how they’ve built and optimized them; incorporate similar elements that will work for your small company website.
- Find out what your target audience wants from your site and make it simple for them to acquire it.
- Maintain a consistent brand across the design of your website.
- Create a user-friendly navigation system that allows users to rapidly access the pages they require.
- Make contact information clearly available.
- Include clear call-to-actions (particularly “purchase now” buttons).
- Make your small company website search engine friendly
SEO is a set of techniques you use on your website to guarantee that search engines properly index and rank it, and then display it to search engine users. When search engines “scan” your website, it competes with other websites with comparable information. The better the design and substance of your website, the higher it will rank in search engine results pages.
SEO is a continuous process that can mean the difference between appearing on the first page of search engine results pages (leading in a flood of free visitors to your website) and appearing on page 300. (Resulting in no traffic).
- Create and publish high-quality content on a regular basis
Search engines value both amount and freshness of information, so make a plan to publish high-quality articles and/or blog posts on your own site as well as on sites that connect to yours. You must update your website with new and relevant material as regularly as possible if you want to rank well in search engine results and attract people to visit your site again and again.
In addition to static page content and articles, testimonials are a terrific type of material to provide on your website. Requesting client testimonials and then publishing them on your website is a terrific approach to keep your website fresh with high-quality material that promotes your small business.
- Download and install webmaster tools
Install Google Analytics and Google Search Console (both preferably via Google Tag Manager) as well as Bing Webmaster Tools to assist you analyses traffic and site performance. These tools can be used to keep track of the following data:
- Visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis • Average time spent on site by visitors • Number of views on each page of your site
- Errors in the crawling of your website (errors that the search engines found on your site in crawling its content)
- The site’s broken links
- Keywords that drive traffic to your website
- Your website’s back links
- Time it takes to download a web page
- Additional information that can assist you in improving your SEO
- Create a website upkeep strategy
A website should not be built and then forgotten about. You must ensure that your website is properly maintained in order to have a successful website that ranks well in search engines and is not hacked.
