How To Build A Small Business Website For Beginners

Building a business website is one of the best ways to brand your company for many potential customers. Having a website allows you to make a fantastic first impression and reassure customers that you are a legitimate business. Today, Money24H will give you the guidelines of small business construction so that you can know how to build a basic website.

10 steps to build a website for a small business

Domain name

Domain name, also known as the address of the website, is often the entry point to the site. A domain name is essential for a website because it creates a good impression for usability purposes and search engine optimization (SEO).

Having a good domain name will help your website be more friendly to users. An optimal domain may have to meet some requirements as follows:

• Easy to spell: Words or names that are complicated or uncommon may be difficult to remember and spell exactly. Therefore, domain names should have simple words and relevant keywords to help people type accurately. 
• A good domain name should be as short as possible: It’s ideal when a domain name contains 2-3 words. Shorter names make your website easier for users to find.
• Use suitable domain extension: Try to make a “.com” domain name unless it is more appropriate to use another extension, such as .gov, .edu, or .org.
• Avoid using numbers or hyphens: These characters are difficult to type, which means it is less memorable than word-only domain names. It also worst that domain names having numbers or dashes may be misunderstood when vocalizing among domain names.
• Broanden address to support future growth: You can create a website that consists of smaller websites from several business majors. This thing will enable your website to sell more types of products/services to more customer segments.
• Create an impression for the website: It is important to have a catchy and remarkable website name so that users can remember it easily and probably find your website in the future.
• Research domain names: Make sure that your domain name is unique because Google will report some similar websites to those that have already existed  online. Search on a tool to ensure your domain does not include any registered trademarks.
• Build an SEO - friendly URL: Some tips you can do to make a SEO - friendly URL are: remove special characters, numbers, and excessive information; optimize the url so that it just contain the key word or geo-location… 

Secure website hosting service

A website host is a service offering technology and things that are necessary for website to appear on the internet. After your website connects to the website host, you can manage your website, upload html file and others on server, install CMS, access to database and make backup for site.

Depending on the technology and support you select, hosting services might range from $2 to $100+ each month. You can usually obtain a discount if you buy a yearly plan rather than a monthly plan.

Everrank give you a guide to help you choose a good website hosting plan as following:

• Advoid using “shared server”: Using share server maybe risky althought you can obtain customer data from other website you share sever with. If one of the other websites on your shared server is hacked, your website may become affected as well.
• Use “dedicated server”: A dedicated server plan means that the physical server machine is completely contributed to your site; as a result, all of the resources are yours, and it is more safe than a shared hosting plan, as long as the technology is appropriate. There only one problem is that dedicated server cost quite much money.
• Check that your hosting provider provides phone and/or chat assistance: so that you can get help fast if you have a problem. When a problem needs to be fixed promptly, email help can frequently take too long and become annoying. Phone support is preferable, but chatting works just as well.
• Your website hosting company should have server security: Your server's contents should be backed up on a daily basis. Installing Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates should also be simple, requiring only one or two clicks. Check that the hosting business does frequent security checks. Ideally, your hosting provider will have a public security protocol that you can evaluate to see how they maintain their servers secure.

Clear description of your business

It is necessary to let users know who company are and what is it doing right away so that they are not confused while visiting your small company website. Make sure your main homepage banner and subsequent banners are the visual representations of your services, and that you include a text blurb towards the top of the page that conveys who you are and what you do.

Additionally, make sure that "About Us" page links are easily available in both your main and footer navigation menus so that people can click them and explore more about your company.

Content management system

A content management system (CMS) is a package of software that allows you to generate and manage digital material. A strong CMS will help you maintain your site and requires little technical knowledge to utilize. You should select a CMS that is tailored to your specific requirements; different systems are utilized for various reasons, such as user-friendliness, extensibility, and cost.

There are some common systems with a general details for you to compare and acknowledge:

• Wordpress: It is said to be the world’s most popular CMS. It offers a large, active support community and a variety of useful plugins to help you increase the capabilities of your site. (And if you can't find a plugin that does what you need, you can always hire a WordPress developer to create one for you!) WordPress is also free and reasonably easy to set up. Most website developers are familiar with it, so finding an individual or business to work on your site should not be difficult. One of the remarkable weaknesses of WordPress is security. Hackers often target WordPress due to its popularity.  Your WordPress site must be routinely maintained and secured in order to avoid being hacked. Furthermore, because it is difficult to secure every third-party plugin, keeping your WordPress site secure must be a continuous commitment through multiple best practices.
• Drupal: Drupal is another well-known CMS. It has many of the same advantages of WordPress, such as flexibility, simplicity, and a strong support community. Notably, it is a more secure CMS than WordPress (less vulnerable to criminal behavior); but, it lacks as many plugin or theme possibilities, making it less expandable.
• Joomla: Joomla is another popular CMS! It boasts greater SEO, security, and multilingual features out of the box than WordPress. However, Joomla has less supportive plugins than WordPress.

Good e-commerce platform

If you intend to sell items and/or services through your website, you will need the appropriate technology. Furthermore, if you wish to allow consumers to do financial transactions with you online, you must select the appropriate platform for your company's strategy.

When selecting an ecommerce platform, there are six essential elements to consider including the platform's price, themes offered, payment choices, technical support, functionality, and security. Remember to conduct extensive studies and comparisons on all factors before deciding on one. At the same time, we encourage you to do a free trial of the site before purchasing a package so thay you can compare among ecommerce platforms. Some well - known E - Commerce you can explore can be: WooCommerce, Shopify, Business Squarespace. Wix,...

Website user interface

Make sure the interface of your small company website creates a pleasant impression in order to lead to the best results. You can conduct this by executing the following recommendations:

• Create eye-catching images and easy-to-read fonts.
• Make certain that your visuals are compressed and optimized for quick download. Search engines, such as Google, will punish your rating if your website is slow.
• Analize your competitors' websites to see how they have built and optimized their websites, then apply similar components that will work for your small company website.
• Determine your target audience, figure out what they want from your site, then make it simple for them to acquire it.
• Maintain brand consistency across your website design and create an easy-to-use navigation system so that it can allow people to rapidly access the pages when necessary.
• Create a standard pages that are commonly-used for small business websites, such as:
  • Home
  • About us
  • Products/Services (with descriptions and visually appealing images)
  • Sitemap (for SEO company purposes)
  • Management team
  • Contact us
  • Terms of use (the online contract governing how users can use your site)
  • Privacy policy
  • Additional pages relevant to your specific small business

Small business website optimization

SEO is a set of techniques you use on your website to ensure search engines properly index and rank your website, then display it to search engine visitors. When search engines "scan" your website, it competes with websites that contain comparable material. The better the design and substance of your website, the higher it will rank in search engine results pages.

SEO consists primarily of the following practices:

• Keyword investigation and application
• Optimal website code
• Quick loading rate of the website
• Being secure and having an SSL certificate enabled; SSL is the industry standard security technique that ensures data transmitted between web servers and browsers is kept secret.
• Having a mobile-friendly site
• The presence of high-quality backlinks (links on external websites with related content) pointing to your site.
• Having a lot of favorable feedback online (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.)
• Using internal connections throughout your website to keep visitors clicking and reading (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.)

Quality content

Both amount and comprehence of information are vital to search engines, so you need to make a plan to publish quality articles or blog entries on your site and on external sites that connect to your site. If you want to rank high in search engine results and encourage people to return to your site, you must update it as regularly as possible with new and relevant material. Another highlight is that content need to apdapt SEO requirement and be informative with users.

Reviews, in addition to static page content and articles, are a wonderful sort of content to provide on your website. Requesting client feedback on your company and then publishing it on your website is a great way to create new, high-quality content that can help your small business development.

Webmaster tools

Install Google Analytics, Google Search Console (ideally via Google Tag Manager), and Bing Webmaster Tools to collect critical data to assist you assess traffic and site performance. These tools can be used to track the following categories of data like: numbers of visitors, bounce rate, average time spent on site by users, broken links, …etc

Website maintenance

To have a successful website that ranks high in search engines and is not in the verse of being hacked, you must ensure that it is well maintained. Some guideline that you can adopt to maintain your website such as: check data of webmaster tools monthly, study about your user through traffic data, keep all software updated usually, run security scan often to protect you website…

Frequently asked questions about designing a small business website

1. How to create business website free? 

You can create business website free by Wix.com, Weebly, Godaddy, Yola.com….

2. What to put on a website for a business?

Some things you should put on a website for a business are: A clear description of who you are, An easily-navigated site map, Easy-to-find contact information, customer feedback… 

EverRanks had given you some information about something you need to know if you intend to build a basic website. Hope that you can have some meaningful knowledge from what our SEO company provided. Follow us to learn more about online marketing!

Source: EverRanks