Building a top-notch business website is extremely important for any entrepreneur today. Irrespective of whether you run a small boutique, a mid-sized beauty salon, or a freelance photography business, having a website to showcase your best offerings will ensure that your business attains higher market penetration and leads acquisition online.
For those who don’t have much know-how in website building and designing, it can be a bit daunting to commence this process.
Let us look at the key steps to build a business website with effective strategies:
1. Outline your website objectives, before collaborating with web design services or web development services
What do you intend to accomplish from your website? This is the first question you need to answer before checking out the various website design services or getting in touch with a digital marketing agency.
Before you ask for a meeting or quote, make the following points clear:-
- Details/Type of information to be conveyed through your website
- Kind of offerings to be showcased and how you want to convey your USP
- Desired call-to-action for visitors- online purchase/online queries/offline purchase/telephonic queries etc
Once these objectives are clear, you can explore the different web design services available within your budget, and convey exactly the kind of business website you want.
2. Selecting the right website building platform
The right choice of website building platform is crucial. For SMEs, it is best to opt for a simple, inexpensive, and user-friendly platform. The two main choices are WordPress, or a hosted website builder. If you are confused about the various choices, it is always wiser to seek professional guidance. Many IT service providers customize their web design packages as per the needs of small start-ups and SMEs.
3. Pick the right domain name
The domain name you pick for your website should be highly relevant to your business, and should ideally include a keyword relevant to your niche. At the same time, it needs to be short, crisp, catchy, and shouldn’t have unnecessary symbols or characters. If you are confused, there are many free domain name generators that you can use, to finalize the best one available.
4. Opt for the right Web Hosting Plan (Before exploring web design services and other related aspects)
If you are completely new to the realm of website building, you might need to consult a reputed service provider for website design services, or a good digital marketing agency, before you get a hosting plan to run your site.
Shared hosting is cheaper, but it may compromise the speed and overall performance of your website to a certain extent. Dedicated hosting is costlier, but it is highly recommended if you own a digital business with crucial online sales.
Whether you opt for shared or dedicated hosting, always ensure that you cross-check the reliability and location of the hosting service provider before going ahead with the deal.
5. Choosing a Web Design Template
The choice of website template is dependent on your business model. For instance, if you are a freelance celebrity makeup artist, your website will obviously be flashy, suave, and depict a lot of attractive visuals with vivid colours. On the other hand, a cement company will have a more professional-looking website with lots of informative content, keeping in mind its B2B marketing requirements. One common objective for all businesses today, would be to choose a mobile-friendly web design.
6. Creating Website Pages
This is where the role of a good web developer is crucial. Not only do the pages of your website have to be well-designed, they need to depict content in a sequential manner.
Also, the landing pages such as home-page or localized landing pages need to be created with special attention by a coding expert.
Of course for WordPress sites, you can build the pages yourself but the knack and appeal of a professionally-built site cannot be compared with that of an amateurish one.
Ideally for small and mid-sized business owners, the typical hierarchy of pages includes home page, about us page, product/service category and sub-category pages, portfolio pages, testimonial pages, contact us page, and so on. Based on the type of business, there can be alterations made as and where necessary.
7. Testing and Publishing
Testing is very important to eliminate any loopholes such as broken links or 404 errors. After a successful trial run, your website will finally go live.
8. SEO Campaign
Your website needs to be well-optimized for search engines to start ranking it for the chosen set of keywords. You should ideally start with Local SEO techniques, helmed by a trusted SEO agency.
Conclusion
The good news for SME and start-up owners is that there are many service providers and free resources online, to help you build an excellent business website with minimal investment. All it takes is a little know-how, and a discerning eye to entrust the right web designer with your requirements.
