By Allison Bowlus
Whether you’re a freelance photographer, owner of a hardware store, or have another type of small business, a great website is essential to the success of your business . As a webmaster who has worked on building or marketing over 100 small business websites, I know what it takes to create great and beautiful business websites.
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If you are building a new startup website or your current ones more effectively, here are 10 essential steps to get started and help your small business website compete effectively in the online marketplace.
1. Get a good domain name
Your domain name, also known as your website address, is often the entry point to your website. Making a good impression is important for both usability and search engine optimization (SEO) reasons.
Here are some tips on how to find an optimal domain name:
- Make spelling easier. Don’t use slang, made-up or extremely esoteric words.
- Keep it as short as possible. The shorter it is, the easier it is to remember and type it correctly.
- Use the correct domain extension. Always use a .com domain name (as opposed to .net, .co, etc.) unless it’s more appropriate to use another extension like .gov, .edu, or .org. li>
- Avoid numbers and hyphens. They are difficult to remember and less elegant and memorable than word-only domain names and can be misunderstood when pronouncing the domain name.
- Broaden the address to facilitate future growth . For example, Amazon.com is a much more comprehensive website address than BooksOnline.com and allows Amazon to sell pretty much any type of consumer product, rather than just books, as was the original purpose.
- Make sure it’s memorable. With so many websites on the Internet, it’s important that your website name is memorable so that people will remember how to access it in the future.
- Research it domain names. Google to see if a similar website address already exists online and search USPTO.gov to make sure it doesn’t contain any registered trademarks.
- Check whether the price is right. See if you can get the website address you want at a reasonable price, as most good domain names are taken and will need to be bought from the current owner.
- Avoid nonsensical ones names. Choose a name that conveys meaning so users will immediately know what your business is. Yahoo and Google are catchy names, but branding them has been very expensive, and your small business may not have the same budget.
- Create an SEO-friendly URL. If necessary, try to find a SEO-friendly website address that includes keywords and geolocation; for example “www.LasVegasElectrician.com.”
2. Purchase secure, scalable website hosting with good technical support
A website host (sometimes referred to as a website hosting provider) is a company that offers the technology and services needed to make it a website can be viewed on the Internet. They connect your domain name to your hosting provider so that users visiting your website address will see your website, which you store in your hosting account.
Hosting services can range from $2 to $100 cost per month. depending on the type of technology and support you choose. You usually get a discount when you buy an annual plan as opposed to a monthly plan.
Here are some guidelines for choosing a good website hosting plan:
- Although If you can get a “shared server” hosting plan for as little as $2 a month, I would normally advise against it. Shared hosting means that you share a server and its resources with other customers, which can affect your website’s performance. Also, if one of the other websites on your shared server is hacked, it’s possible that your website will also be infected.
- A “dedicated server”Hosting plan is the most expensive option – costs can range from $100 to $2,000 per month – but it will get your website working at its best. A dedicated server plan means that the physical server computer is fully dedicated to your site; Therefore, all resources are yours and it is more secure than a shared hosting plan as long as the technology is optimal. However, it is much more expensive than what most small businesses are usually willing to pay. Once you have a very powerful website, this might be what you need, but it’s overkill for most young and small businesses.
- The trade-off that I usually recommend is a “Virtual Private Server” (VPS) hosting plan that offers the best of both worlds. The cost ranges from around $20 to $50 per month, which is affordable for the hosting services you get.A VPS is a computer partitioned to act as multiple computers, giving it similar affordability to shared hosting, with similar security and performance potential to a dedicated server hosting plan.
- Make sure your hosting company has phone and/or chat support so you can get help quickly if you have any problems. Email support can often take too long and become frustrating when an issue needs to be resolved immediately. Phone support is best, but chatting works well too.
- There needs to be a user-friendly server interface such as cPanelto access your server. You don’t want to have to use terminal commands to view your server content and make changes unless you can afford to hire a professional server administrator to help you.
- Check to see what type of server security is in place on the server you are considering. You want to be able to access your server using Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). Daily backups of your server content should be taken. There should also be an easy one or two click method to install Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. Make sure the hosting company does regular security maintenance. Ideally, your hosting company will have a published security log that you can check so you know how they protect their servers.
Some popular website hosting companies are:
- GoDaddy
- DreamHost
- Bluehost
- InMotion
- SiteGround
3. Prominently present a clear description of your business
It’s important that people know who you are and what you do right away so they don’t get confused when they visit your small business website. Make sure your main homepage banner (aka “hero image”) and subsequent banners are visual representations of your services, and that you have an introductory blurb at the top of the page that describes who you are and what They do.
Also make sure that both your main and footer navigation menus have easily accessible “About Us” page links so people can click on them and learn more about your business.
4 . Implement the Best Content Management System
A content management system (CMS) is a software program or application used to create and manage digital content. A good CMS will help you maintain your website and you don’t need much technical knowledge to use it. You should choose a CMS that is tailored to your individual needs; Different systems are used for different reasons, e.g. B. Ease of use, extensibility and budget.
The following are some popular systems with descriptions of their strengths and weaknesses.
WordPress: WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS. It has a huge, active support community and lots of useful plugins to add functionality to your website. (And if you can’t find a plugin that does what you want, it’s easy to find a WordPress developer who can create one for you!) WordPress is also free and relatively easy to install. Most website developers are familiar with this, so finding a person or agency that can work on your website is not difficult. I usually recommend small businesses to use WordPress to build their websites due to its flexibility and extensibility.
However, it must be noted that the main weakness of WordPress is security – because it is so popular, hackers target the most. Your WordPress site needs regular maintenance and backup to keep it from being hacked. Also, it’s difficult to secure every single third-party plugin, so keeping your WordPress site secure must be an ongoing commitment through various best practices (checking if your plugins have been updated in the last few months to make sure it’s a Plugin provided in the official WordPress repository, delete unused plugins immediately, etc.).
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Drupal: Drupal is another popular CMS. It offers many of the same benefits as WordPress, including flexibility, ease of use, and a large support community. In particular, it is a more secure CMS than WordPress (safer from malicious activity); However, it doesn’t have as many plugin or theme options, making it less extensible. For many years the White House website (Whitehouse.gov) was powered by Drupal, but has since switched to WordPress, which it still uses today.
Joomla!: Another one popular tool CMS is Joomla! Out of the box, it has better SEO, security, and multilingual features than WordPress; However, with the help of some plugins, WordPress surpasses the capabilities of Joomla!.
Squarespace: Squarespace is a service that you subscribe to on a monthly or yearly basis and allows the creation of websites and blogs simple drag-and-drop experience.It includes website design, development, software maintenance, metrics, annual purchase domain names, SSL security, 24/7 support, and unlimited bandwidth and storage hosting all in one package. It is particularly suitable for creative people and provides you with first-class design templates. If you’re on a tight budget, need a simple and beautiful website, but can’t afford a website designer, this is a great service for you.
Squarespace has a much shorter learning curve than WordPress. Drupal and Joomla! but it doesn’t have nearly as many extensibility options. However, if you have little or no technical knowledge and are looking for a quick and easy way to build a website, Squarespace is a great option for you.
Wix: Wix is Very similar to Squarespace but a bit more user-friendly. It offers a monthly but not a yearly subscription and includes similar features. Wix is also a drag-and-drop builder – you can drag and drop elements anywhere on the page; In comparison, Squarespace is more structured in terms of where you can drag and drop on the page. The learning curve for using Wix is even shorter than Squarespace. So if you need to get a website published quickly, this might be your best option.
Wix has a lot more templates to choose from than Squarespace, but only once you decide on a template is you need to stick with it or be forced to completely rebuild your website. With Squarespace, you can change your template at any time without having to rebuild the entire site.
5. Choose a Good Ecommerce Platform
If you plan to sell goods and/or services through your website, you need the right technology to do it. (If you’re not currently selling anything, consider doing so, as e-commerce could potentially increase your profits.) If you choose to allow users to transact with you online, you need to choose the right platform for you Business Model.
Here are some popular small business ecommerce platforms:
WooCommerce: WooCommerce is one of the world’s most popular ecommerce platforms— It can turn your WordPress website into an online store. As with WordPress, there are many plugins available, and it attaches to WordPress, making it extremely flexible. There are many free and premium themes that are pre-built for WooCommerce. (It’s usually better to use a premium theme from a reputable developer, as it offers better security and support.) Unless you’re tech-savvy, you’ll most likely need a WordPress developer to help you get set up and helps use it. WooCommerce also offers a very large amount of functionality and scalability that your small business might need.
Shopify: Shopify is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that allows you create and customize an online store and to manage products, inventory, payments and shipping. It’s not a WordPress extension like WooCommerce – it’s a standalone platform hosted on the Shopify server – so if you have a main website, your ecommerce site would be technically separate from it. You can link to your Shopify account from your regular website built with WordPress, Drupal, Wix, etc. unless your main website has a Shopify integration plugin.
To the Features include unlimited products, unlimited bandwidth, fraud analysis, discount codes, reports and more. The main advantages of Shopify are that you don’t need a developer to set up a store and everything on the backend is already set up for you when you sign up. The downside is that you don’t have as much control or flexibility over your store as you do with WooCommerce.
Shopify Plus: Shopify Plus is Shopify but with a higher level of customization, more employee accounts and international e-commerce options. It also has a higher level of support. However, all of this obviously comes with higher subscription costs, and it still doesn’t have the flexibility and customization options of WooCommerce.
Business Squarespace: Squarespace has an e- So if you’re Squarespace for building your website and have very basic ecommerce needs, you can choose this option. Business Squarespace charges a transaction fee, but this can be bypassed by upgrading your subscription to a basic online store. It includes a free domain, SSL security, SEO, abandoned cart recovery, discounts, real-time shipping, and more. However, it has been found not to be as user-friendly as Shopify. And like Shopify, it just isn’t as flexible as WooCommerce.
Wix: Wix actually has a Shopify extension that’s very user-friendly. You’ll need to upgrade your Wix account and subscribe to Shopify to use it.
GoDaddy Online Store: GoDaddy has a relatively new standalone ecommerce subscription platform, which is relative easy to set up and use.Very little technical knowledge is required to open your shop with the GoDaddy Online Store. The templates are simple and clean, and somewhat customizable. Features include marketing and SEO tools, social media integration, appointment booking, SSL security, fast page loads and more.
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6. Create an interesting, memorable, and engaging website UI
Make sure your small business website’s UI creates a positive impression that gets results. You can do this by implementing the following suggestions:
- Use nice graphics and easy-to-read fonts.
- Make sure your graphics are compressed and loaded for fast loading are optimized. If your website is slow, search engines like Google will penalize your ranking.
- Research the competition to see how they designed and optimized their websites; Implement similar components that will work for your small business website.
- Research your audience to see what they want from your website and make it easy for them to achieve it.
- Stay consistent Brand your entire website design.
- Design an intuitive navigation system that lets users quickly get to the pages they need.
- Post easily accessible contact information.
- Include obvious calls-to-action (particularly “buy now” buttons).
- Create pages that are standard for small business websites , such as E.g.:
- Home
- About us
- Products/Services (with descriptions and visually appealing images)
- Sitemap (for SEO purposes )
- Management Team
- Contact Us
- Terms of Service (the online contract that governs how users can use your website)
- Privacy Policy
- Additional pages relevant to your specific small business
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7. Optimize Your Small Business Website For Search Engines
SEO is a set of practices you apply to your website to ensure that search engines index and rank your website appropriately and then show it to search engine users. Once your website is “crawled” by search engines, it competes with websites with similar content. The better your website design and content, the higher your website will appear on search engine results pages.
SEO mainly includes the following practices:
- Keyword research and -Implementation
- Optimal website code
- Fast loading speed
- Be safe and have SSL certificate installed; SSL is the standard security technology that ensures data transmitted between web servers and browsers remains private.
- Have a mobile-friendly website
- Existence of high-quality backlinks (links to external sites with related content) leading to your site
- Having many positive reviews online (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.)
- Using internal links throughout your site so that the People click on and read
- Using social media to link your website (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.)
SEO is an extremely important ongoing process that can make the difference appearing on the first page of search engine results pages (which brings large amounts of free traffic to your site) or on page 300 (which brings no traffic).
8. Create and publish high-quality content on a regular basis
Both quantity and freshness of content are important to search engines, so it’s important that you create a plan to deliver high-quality articles and/or blog posts Publish on your website and on external websites linked to your website. If you want to rank high in search engine results and encourage people to keep coming back to your site, you need to update your site with new and relevant content as often as possible.
In addition to static page content and articles , a great form of content to post on your site is testimonials. Asking your customers for testimonials and then posting them on your site allows you to post fresh, quality content to your site that will make your small business more attractive.
Make sure your content is an appropriate use , on-brand tone that people will enjoy reading.
9. Install Webmaster Tools
Leverage key data to analyze site traffic and performance by using Google Analytics and Google Search Console (both preferably via Google Tag Manager) and Bing Install Webmaster Tools.These tools can be used to track the following types of information:
- Daily, weekly and monthly visitors to your website
- Number of views of each page on your website
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- “Bounce rate” – the percentage of users who come to your website and leave after viewing just one page (Google algorithms give higher rankings to websites with a low bounce rate, based on the theory that visitors Spend more time on the site and find it valuable.)
- Average time visitors spend on the site
- Crawling errors on your site (Errors that the search engines crawl when crawling found on your site content)
- Broken links on the site
- Keywords that bring users to your site
- Backlinks to your site
- Web page download time
- More information that may help you to improve your SEO
10. Implement a Website Maintenance Plan
A website shouldn’t be built and then become stale. In order to have a successful website that ranks well in search engines and doesn’t get hacked, you need to make sure it’s properly maintained.
Here are some tips for creating a small business maintenance plan:
- Check Webmaster Tools data at least once a month and get real-time emails of important errors.
- Use access data to learn more about your audience to learn more about them.
- Use performance data to tune and fix warnings and errors.
- Ensure all software is always up to date.
- Run security scans so you know your site is malware-free and hasn’t been hacked.
- Use “split tests” to determine if certain variations of your site improve performance; For example, if you are selling a product, you may have two versions of a given landing page with different images and text – the split test will show you which version has a higher conversion rate.
- Follow my SEO advice (see point 7) and continuously post quality content (see point 8).
- Find trendy and effective ways to market your business online.
- Allow website users to To give you feedback on your website.
- Continue to visit your competitors from time to time to see what they are doing with their online presence and see if what they have been doing may work for you too.
- Make sure your website is backed up at least once a day and at least 10 days back in several ways.
Conclusion
As you can see after reading this article, creating a great Creating a great small business website might not be as easy as you first thought. However, if you follow the steps outlined in this article, your small business has an excellent chance of succeeding in the online market.
About the Author
I’m a webmaster specializing in WordPress, Graphic Design, Mobile-Friendly Website Development, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, User Interfaces, E-Commerce, and Blogging/Social Media Marketing. Originally from Ohio, I received my Bachelor of Science degree from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, majoring in Web Design and Interactive Media. I have been involved in the creation or marketing of over 100 business websites. To find out how to drive traffic to your website, read my article Small Business Internet Marketing Strategy: Pay Per Click Advertising and Search Engine Optimization. Visit my website www.allisonbowlus.com and connect with me on LinkedIn.
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This article was originally published on AllBusiness.com.
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