A website is a critical tool for small businesses. It’s an essential piece of your branding and marketing efforts, and it gives customers and clients a place to learn more about your company, products, and services.
Maybe you’re starting a small business from scratch and need to build a website from the ground up. Or maybe you have an existing website that’s in need of a facelift. Either way, we’re here to help you create a small business website that’s both effective and engaging. Here are eight steps to get you started.
Step 1: Define Your Purpose
The first step is to define your purpose for having a website. What do you want your website to achieve? Do you want to generate leads? Sell products or services online? Provide information about your company? Once you know your purpose, you can start to develop goals and objectives for your site. For example, if you want to generate leads, your goal might be to get visitors to fill out a contact form or sign up for a newsletter. If you want to sell products online, your goal might be to get visitors to add items to their shopping cart and complete the checkout process.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience
The next step is to identify your target audience—the people who you want to visit your site and take action. Once you know who your target audience is, you can start catering your content and messaging to them specifically. This will make it more likely that they’ll take the action you want them to take when they visit your site (like filling out a form or buying a product).
Step 3: Choose Your Domain Name
The first thing you need to do is choose a domain name—the URL where people will find your site (www.[yourdomainname].com).
Step 4: Find a Web Hosting Provider
Once you have a domain name, you need to find a web hosting provider—a company that will store all of the files and data for your website on their servers (think of it like rent for virtual real estate).
Step 5: Decide on a Platform
Finally, you need to choose the platform that will power your site—the software that will turn all of those files and data into an actual website, something like WordPress or Wix.
Step 6: Create Compelling Content
Once you have the technical side of things set up, it’s time to start creating content for your site. Content includes everything from the text on each page (like the body copy and headings) to images, videos, infographics, PDFs—basically anything people will see or read when they visit your site. Start by creating an outline of all the pages and types of content you want on your site (typically called “Wireframing”), then start filling in those pages with actual text, images, etc.
As you’re creating content, keep in mind what action(s) you want people take when they visit each page—do you want them fill out a form? Buy something? Contact you? Make sure every page on your site has at least one call-to-action (CTA) so people always know what their next step should be.
Step 7: Optimize & Launch Your Website
One of the final steps before launch is optimizing each page on your site for search engines (SEO) and making sure everything works perfectly. Once that’s all set, hit the “Publish” button and make your site live!
Step 8: Promoting Your Website
After launch, don’t forget to start promoting it through advertising campaigns, social media, email marketing, etc.—if no one knows your site exists then nobody will visit it!
Conclusion:
By following these eight simple steps, you can create a small business website that achieves your goals and objectives—generating leads, growing sales, providing information about what you do, or any combination thereof. And remember: once you launch, don’t forget to promote it! Otherwise, nobody will know it exists.
