Step 1: Do some planning
As with any business activity, doing some planning first will help to ensure your website is a success. Here are four things you should consider before you start building your business website:
- What is the main purpose of your website? It may seem obvious, but it’s the most important question to ask yourself. Think about your business goals and why you need a website. Do you just need a simple website that tells the story of your business and provides your contact information? Will you need e-commerce functionality so that your website can handle sales? How important are visuals?
- Who is your target audience ? What kind of demographic are you trying to attract? Knowing this will help you in making design choices later on. Think about what type of website design might appeal to your target audience.
- What is your budget? Set a firm budget with an allowance for contingencies. If your budget allows for it, you might consider engaging a web developer who can build your website for you. Otherwise, doing it yourself is usually a more cost-effective option. And with the assistance of a content management system (read on to find out more), you don’t need to be a tech genius to create your own professional website.
- What are your competitors doing? While you want to stand out against the competition, it’s also important to align your website with the industry standards. Do some competitor research by having a look at some websites of similar businesses. Find three or four elements of their website design that you would like to be consistent with, and three or four elements that you want to make your own.
Step 2: Choose a content management system (CMS)
Fortunately, you don’t need to know how to write code to build a professional-looking website. A content management system (CMS) is a website design platform that allows you to create, modify and manage content on a website. There are various CMSs out there. It’s worth spending some time looking into which one will work best for you.
Your main choice is between an all-in-one website builder or the more technically challenging alternative, WordPress. Both will allow you to create a visually appealing, professional website, but they demand different skill levels. All-in-one website builders, such as Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy or Weebly, give you a template to follow and don’t require much technical expertise at all, whereas WordPress requires some additional steps. Let’s look at some pros and cons of the two options:
All-in-one website builders
Pros
- You can get your website set up quickly.
- You can save time and money because hosting, free templates, page-building tools and free domains are often included.
- You don’t need to know coding because most website builders provide templates.
Cons
- They restrict your creativity more than WordPress. It is more difficult to customise your website and create something unique. That said, Wix provides more customisation options than many other website builders.
- It can be difficult to add new features or even pages to your site without coding knowledge, meaning that you can outgrow your website quickly.
- If you decide to swap to another website builder, you’ll probably have to build your site again from scratch.
WordPress
Pros
- The possibilities for customisation are almost limitless, meaning that you can create a unique website that is well suited to your business.
- It offers more than 50,000 plugins, so it’s easy to add extra functions.
- It’s a very popular website builder with reliable software.
Cons
- It requires more steps than all-in-one website builders. You’ll need to get web hosting and a domain, find a compatible theme, download plugins, as well as install and maintain the WordPress software.
- Unlike most other website builders, WordPress doesn’t provide dedicated customer support. So, you’ll need to be confident in your tech abilities or find some other assistance if anything goes wrong.
- The pricing can be deceptive. It looks free initially, but you’ll need to pay for hosting, security, your domain name and plugins, so it usually ends up costing more than you initially expect.
Step 3: Choose your domain name
Your domain name is your website’s unique address, known as a uniform resource locator (URL). For example, Indeed’s domain name in Australia is “https://au.indeed.com“. You’ll be sharing it with customers and promoting it on social media, so it’s extremely important that you choose a domain name that will create a good impression. Ideally, your domain name should be the same as, or at least similar to, your business name. When choosing a name, do some research to make sure there aren’t any similar names out there. To make it less likely that customers will type it incorrectly, keep it short, easy to spell, and avoid abbreviations, unnecessary hyphens and numbers.
You’ll also need to choose your top-level domain (TLD). This is the last part of your domain name. The most common TLDs are .com, .com.au, .net and .biz. Once you’ve chosen a business domain name, you’ll need to register it. Here are three ways to do that:
- Domain registrar: You can purchase a domain name from a domain registrar, such as GoDaddy or Domain.com for between $10 and $20 a year.
- Web host: Hosting plans from web hosts, such as Hostinger or DreamHost, often include a free domain name.
- Website builder: Squarespace, Weebly and Wix often include a free domain name in their paid plans.
Step 4: Choose a theme or template
Next, choose a theme or template on your chosen CMS that will give your site its design and layout. On WordPress, you can choose from various themes, which control the design of the website as well as the back-end functionality in many cases. Most all-in-one website builders, such as Squarespace, offer various templates, which control your site’s appearance, but usually don’t affect the back-end layout or capabilities. Choose a theme or template that meets your business needs. Consider whether it will be easy for your customers to navigate, as well as whether the visual elements match your business branding.
Step 5: Customise your website
Now it’s time to add the content and customise your site. You will need to add pages, delete any unnecessary pages according to your requirements and configure the header and footer for the site. This should all be quite intuitive in the website builder you’ve chosen. As standard, most business websites include the following pages:
- homepage
- products, services or portfolio page
- ‘about us’ page
- contact page
- blog
Step 6: Install plugins or extensions
If you want to add new features to your website, you’ll need plugins (for WordPress) or extensions (for other website builders). There should be a library of plugins or extensions in your website builder. While it can be useful to have extra features, keep in mind that plugins and extensions can slow down your website. It might be a good idea to focus on selecting plugins or extensions that are designed to improve the performance of your website, improve security, back up data, improve search engine optimisation or add e-commerce functionality so that your website can handle sales.
Step 7: Optimise your website for search engines
As slick as your new website may look, it won’t get a lot of traffic unless it is optimised for search engines. So, implementing search engine optimisation is a very important step in the website building process. Search engine optimisation (SEO) refers to all the things you do to improve the appearance and position of your website in search engine results. In other words, it’s how you make your website the first one, or close to the first one, people see when they search for the products or services you offer. Here are some ways you can optimise your website for search engines:
- Use appropriate keywords in your blog posts and pages.
- Optimise your site’s speed and performance.
- Choose a design that makes your site easy to navigate on all devices.
- Add internal and external links.
- Use post names in their permalinks.
Step 8: Test and publish your website
Before publishing, it’s important to review and test your website. Check that it works properly on all of the major web browsers. Read through your content, checking for any typos, grammatical errors, broken links or images that don’t show up. Make sure that your website is easy to use on mobile devices as well, such as smartphones and tablets. This is important because search engines like Google prioritise the performance of your website’s mobile version when determining its ranking in the search results. Once you’re satisfied that everything is looking good, your website is ready to go live!
Now that you’ve invested your time and money in building a professional website, make sure people see it by promoting it on social media and elsewhere.
Also, it’s a good idea to continually update, adapt and add new content to your website as your business grows and evolves. Keeping it fresh will attract new visitors, which is good for business.
