10 Key Steps To Building A Great Small Business Website

A great small business website is a vital element of any successful company. Whether you are a freelance photographer, own a hardware store, or have another type of small business, a great website is essential for your company’s success. As a webmaster who has worked on building or marketing over 100 small business websites, I know what it takes to create great and engaging business websites.

 If you are looking to build a new startup website or make your current site more effective, we have you covered. 10 key steps will help get you started and help your small business website compete effectively in the online marketplace.

1. Obtain a good domain name

 Your domain name is a big part of your online presence and the first thing that people see when they visit your website. It's important to pick a memorable and easy-to-remember domain name as it’s often the entry point to your site. We can help you find available domains and register them for you if available, or provide advice on alternative options if needed.

Here are some tips for coming up with an optimal domain name:

·         Make it easy to spell. Try not to 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 correctly.

·         Use the proper domain extension. Try to always make it a .com domain name (as opposed to .net, .co, etc.) unless it is more appropriate to use another extension, such as .gov, .edu, or .org.

·         Avoid numbers and hyphens. They are hard to remember and less elegant and memorable than word-only domain names, and may be misunderstood when vocalizing the domain name.

·         Make the address broad to facilitate future growth. For example, Amazon.com is a much broader website address than BooksOnline.com and allows Amazon to sell pretty much every type of consumer good instead of books only, as was its original purpose.

·         Ensure it is memorable. With so many websites on the internet, it is important that your website name is catchy so people will remember how to access it in the future.

·         Research the domain name. Google it to see if a similar website address already exists online, and search on USPTO.gov to make sure it does not contain any registered trademarks.

·         Check if the price is right. Determine if you can purchase your desired website address at a reasonable price since most good domain names are taken and will need to be bought from the current owner.

·         Avoid nonsensical names. Choose a name that conveys a meaning so that users will know immediately what your business is. Yahoo and Google are catchy names, but they were very expensive to brand, and your small business may not have the same budget.

·         Create an SEO-friendly URL. When appropriate, try to come up with an SEO-friendly website address that includes keywords and geo-location; for example, “www.LasVegasElectrician.com.”

2. Purchase secure, scalable website hosting with good tech support

 Get your own professional-looking website with a professional host that makes it easy to start, update and grow. Plus, you get unlimited email inboxes for your domain names hosted with us, plus unlimited bandwidth and space so you can upload all the files you need. You can also create subdomains on our hosting plans.

 Hosting is the process of housing your website files and databases so that they are available on the internet. This is where you will connect your domain name to so that it is accessible from anywhere around the world from any type of device. Your website host also helps to ensure there are no problems with security or speed and prevents attacks by bots, viruses and other forms of cyber-crime."

When you purchase secure, scalable website hosting with good tech support, you know that your site is backed up in the event of a security breach or other incident. Depending on the kind of technology and support you choose, this service can cost anywhere between $2 to $100+ per month. You can usually get a discount if you purchase a yearly plan as opposed to a monthly plan.

 Here are some guidelines for choosing a good website hosting plan

     You get what you pay for in web hosting. If you go with shared hosting, be prepared to deal with poor performance and site crashes. I would typically advise against this. Shared hosting means you are sharing a server and its resources with other customers, which can make the performance of your site suffer. Also, if one of the other websites on your shared server is hacked, it is possible for your website to also be infected. 

     A “dedicated server” hosting plan is the most expensive option—cost can range from around $100 to $2,000 per month—but it would make your website perform the most optimally. Once you have a very high-performing site, this may be what you need, but it is overkill for most early stage and small businesses.

      Have an account with a dedicated server, but not sure if it offers enough security? Or maybe it's too expensive? The compromise I typically recommend is a “virtual private server” (VPS) hosting plan which offers the best of both worlds. The cost ranges from around $20 to $50 per month, which is affordable for the hosting services you will receive. A VPS is one machine that is partitioned to act as multiple machines, which gives it a similar affordability to shared hosting, with similar security and performance potential as a dedicated server hosting plan.

      You need to have an easy to use server interface like cPanel to access your server. You do not want to have to use terminal commands to view your server contents and make changes. This makes it easier for you or a professional server administrator to help you.

   Make sure you choose a web hosting company that offers secure and scalable hosting options with good tech support. You need to be able to upload files quickly and easily via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). Your host should also back up your server on a daily basis, and provide an easy, one or two-click method to install Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. Ideally your host has a published security protocol you can review so you know how they keep their servers safe.

3. Prominently display a clear description of your business

When you’re launching your small business, it’s important to let people know who you are and what you do right away so they don’t feel confused when they visit your website. Make sure your homepage banner (also known as a “hero image”) and subsequent banners are visual representations of your services, and also have some introductory text blurb near the top of the page that describes who you are and what you do.

4. Implement the best content management system

A content management system (CMS) is a software program or application that helps you maintain your website. You should choose a CMS that is designed for your unique needs; different systems are used for different reasons, such as user-friendliness, extensibility and budget.

Wordpress :

WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS. It supports both a wide variety of content types, as well as responsive design (a topic we will discuss more in Lesson 8). And if you cannot find a plugin that does what you want, it is easy to find a WordPress developer who can make one for you!

Drupal :

Drupal is another popular CMS. Drupal offers many of the same benefits as WordPress, including flexibility, ease of use and a large support community. Notably, it is a more secure CMS than WordPress (safer from malicious activity); however, it doesn’t have as many plugin or theme options makes it less extensible. For many years, the White House website (Whitehouse.gov) was run with Drupal; however it has since changed to run on WordPress with great success!

Joomla :

Joomla! is a very popular CMS, especially with international sites because it supports many languages out of the box. It also has better SEO, security and multilingual capabilities than WordPress; however, with the help of a few plugins, WordPress surpasses Joomla!’s capabilities.

Squarespace :

Squarespace is a service you subscribe to monthly or annually that makes website and blog creation an easy “drag and drop” experience. Squarespace also includes software maintenance, domain name with annual purchase, SSL security, 24/7 support, unlimited bandwidth and storage hosting all in one package. It is especially suitable for creatives and provides you with top-notch templates.

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5. Choose a good e-commerce platform

E-commerce websites can be built using many platforms, but not all of them give you the flexibility to design and operate your business model. Before you build your business website you should choose software that supports the type of model you want to operate, including whether or not you want to allow online financial transactions.

 

WooCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms. It can turn your WordPress website into an online store, and it attaches to WordPress, which makes it extremely flexible. There are many themes available, and it offers scalability, security, and support that you are looking for in an e-commerce solution. If you’re not tech-savvy, you will likely need a WordPress developer to help you set it up and use it.

 

Shopify is a cloud-based eCommerce platform that allows you to create and customize an online store. Shopify offers everything you need to start selling, from software to secure payment processing, and allows you to manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping in one place. Note: It is not a WordPress extension like WooCommerce—it is a standalone platform that’s hosted on the Shopify server—so if you have a main website, your e-commerce site would technically be separate from that. You can link to your Shopify account from your regular website built with WordPress.

6. Create an interesting, memorable, and engaging website user interface

Make sure your small business website interface leaves a positive impression that drives results. You can do so by implementing the following suggestions:

·         Use beautiful graphics and easy-to-read fonts.

·         Make sure your graphics are compressed and optimized for fast loading. If your website is slow, search engines like Google will penalize your ranking.

·         Research the competition to see how they have designed and optimized their websites; implement similar components that will work for your small business website.

·         Research your target audience to see what they want from your site and make it easy for them to accomplish it.

·         Stay consistently on brand throughout your website design.

·         Design an intuitive navigation system which allows users to get to the pages they need quickly.

·         Publish easily accessible contact information.

 

7. Optimize your small business website for search engines

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a set of practices you apply to your website to ensure search engines index and rank your site appropriately and then show it to search engine users. The better your website design and content is, the higher your site will show up on search engine result pages.

8. Regularly create and publish quality content

If you want to rank highly in search engine results and encourage people to return to your site again and again, you will have to update your website with new and relevant content as frequently as possible.

9. Install webmaster tools

Make use of vital data to help you analyze traffic and site performance by installing Google Analytics and Google Search Console (both preferably via Google Tag Manager), and Bing Webmaster Tools. These tools can be used to track the following types of information:

·         Daily, weekly, and monthly visitors to your site

·         Number of views on each page of your site

·         “Bounce rate”—the percentage of users who come to your site and leave after having only viewed one page (Google algorithms give higher rankings to websites that have a low bounce rate, on the theory that visitors are spending more time on the site and find it valuable.)

·         Average time spent on site by visitors

·         Crawl errors on your site (errors that the search engines found on your site in crawling its content)

·         Broken links on the site

·         Keywords that lead users to your site

·         Backlinks to your site

·         Web page download time

·         Other information that can help you enhance your SEO

10. Implement a website maintenance plan

A website shouldn’t be created and then allowed to grow 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 is properly maintained.