When a task arises to create a website for a company and an entrepreneur begins to study the topic, he is faced with conflicting information. He keeps searching “How to build a business website” but hardly gets the right answer. He needs help understanding whether to involve developers or do it himself, use a constructor or CMS, ask a designer to draw a website or choose a ready-made template.
The task seems difficult and incomprehensible.
If you aren’t planning to create a large media portal or an online store with millions of products, you can do without programmers – modern tools allow you to create a simple business website yourself.
This article covers building a business website, what to consider when creating a website with your hands, and what tools to make your work easier.
Define Website Objectives
Before creating a website, decide what tasks the company will solve.
For example:
● Want to place detailed information about the company on the web so that clients and customers can find you through a search
● You need a landing page for one product to launch ads and collect applications quickly
● Is your goal to launch an online store to sell products online or display products as if on a showcase without the possibility of buying?
In the future, when preparing content, you will rely on how the site solves your problems.
Start With Research
For the site not just to “hang” on the Internet but to bring applications and be interesting to users, it is necessary to conduct preliminary preparation and research.
Read Also: Which bank is the best?
Analyze Competitors
To competently stand out among competitors, you need to study them. The simplest thing is to find companies’ websites in your or related niches in the search and analyze their content to research how to build a business website.
What to look for:
● site content: information, articles, photos, videos, instructions
● structure, ease of navigation
● offers: promotions, special offers
● positioning: the benefits of a product or service
● target action: what the client should do on the site, for example, buy a product, or leave a request for a consultation.
See what free services or bonuses competitors offer and make your offer more valuable.
Analyze The Audience
To reach the audience, you need to analyze its requests and problems and try to solve them.
Sources for target audience analysis:
● Data from current customers. The easiest way: ask your customers why they chose you. What criteria influenced the choice, with whom they compared, what did not like the offers of competitors;
● Open sources. These are forums, feedback sites, and groups in social networks. Analyze what customers write about similar products and services, what issues they care about, and their doubts. Then, on the site, try to close these questions. This method is more suitable if your audience is private individuals and the products are designed for the mass segment. Reviews from buyers of expensive or complex products are harder to find in open sources.
Studying how your audience buys your products or orders services is also useful: where they look for them and where they communicate.
Think Content
Website content is its semantic content: structure, headings, text, and pictures. Therefore, content development starts with structure.
Read also: How to create a business plan for your startup?
Develop Site Structure.
The site structure is all its pages located in a certain hierarchy. Therefore, it is necessary to consider it to provide the user with convenient navigation and the logic of presenting information on the site.
Build a semantic core if you want the site easily promoted in search engines. This is a complete list of all keywords you will use on the site.
Collect all the most popular queries on your topic; then, they need to be sorted, grouped, and distributed among the pages of the future site.
Prepare Content For The Site.
When the structure is ready, it will be easier to understand what content the site needs. It is best to start preparing it in advance: decide whether you need to shoot, prepare product descriptions, write articles, shoot videos, and provide instructions. If necessary, involve specialized specialists: a copywriter, photographer, and videographer.
When preparing content, rely on preliminary research of competitors and audiences. Then, try to close all the questions of your potential customers.
Choose a domain and hosting.
You will need a hosting and domain to display the site in the public domain. An exception is if you made a site on a constructor: then you can use the subdomain and hosting of the constructor.
A domain is the address of a website where it can be searched and found on the Internet. It looks, for example, like this: site name.com. And hosting is a remote server, a special powerful computer constantly connected to the network, where all your site files will be stored.
Read Also: Documents needed to open a Bank account
Register a domain.
The US zone is the most popular domain registration zone for users and companies in the US. You can choose a specific domain zone depending on your site. For example, if this is a portfolio, you can select the .name zone; if the educational portal is .edu, for the info portal, .info.
Choosing the domain’s name is the next step.
Here are some rules:
● It is easier to remember a shorter domain name. True, finding a short domain name is more and more difficult
● Many short names on the Internet are already taken
● It is better to use a “-” instead of an underscore if you are registering a complex domain name, such as green-garden;
Choose Hosting
What is important to pay attention to when choosing a hosting
● Server locations: By law, if you collect any data about users, such as phone numbers, and delivery addresses for goods, you are required to store this data on servers in the country.
● Technical support: It is best if the hosting support is 24/7
● Tariff features: the amount of space on the server, whether it is possible to connect a database, how many sites to place, and whether there is an automatic backup of your sites.
Create Your Website
There are 3 ways to create a website yourself:
● assemble from ready-made blocks on the constructor;
● develop a website based on CMS
● write a website from scratch
Next, we will discuss each of them.
1. From ready-made blocks on the designer. The constructor will help with creating a website from scratch. It offers ready-made blocks: a menu, a first screen with a large image, a block of text, or a block with goods in an online store, which you can combine in any order and change for yourself.
2. Develop a website on CMS. Creating a site on a CMS is more difficult; there are also ready-made templates, but there are many more opportunities for personalization and layout: you can make almost any design and function. To create a site on a CMS, you will most likely have to involve a designer and layout designer to make a site design layout and layout it based on the CMS system.
There are many well-known CMS systems: WordPress, Joomla, and 1C-Bitrix. Each of them is suitable for its tasks.
3. Build a website from scratch. For example, an Internet page describing your services can be written from scratch using HTML and CSS.
HTML, Hypertext Markup Language, is a general programming language for creating web page pages. With it, you tell the browser what and how to display on the page when the user opens it. HTML has tags that designate different elements of a page: headings, body text, lists, images, and links.
CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, is a language used to describe the appearance of HTML elements. That is, programmers use styles to prescribe how this or that element on the page should look.
If you want to make a website yourself, you’ll need to learn HTML and CSS, so it’s faster to use website builders or hire an expert.
Test before launch
Before you shift your website to the public, you must check that everything works as intended. Here’s what to look out for.
Download speed. If the site opens slowly, the user may not wait for the information to load and go to your competitors. More recently, Google has considered the loading speed as one of the ranking factors in the search: the faster the site loads, the better its position will be. Of course, this is not the main factor, but if the site loads much slower than competitors, this problem needs to be solved.
Display in browsers. Sometimes in different browsers or on different screens, blocks of the site and its content may be displayed differently.
Convenience for mobile users. A common mistake of entrepreneurs who make websites themselves is not to check how the site page will look in the mobile version. If you prepare it separately, even the site built in the constructor may display incorrectly.
Functionality. Test how the site is displayed on different devices and whether all application and booking forms work. It will not be a professional act if you lose applications because the form did not work on one of the site pages, or the mail with a typo was indicated in the contacts.
End Points
1. Before you create your site, decide what problems it will solve.
2. Start working on the site with audience research and the competitive environment to offer customers the best solution to their pain and stand out from competitors.
3. If you are not going to create a big platform or an online store with hundreds of thousands of products, the easiest way is to build a site in the constructor.
4. To analyze user behavior on the site and the number of applications, install analytics systems, such as Google Analytics.
5. Be sure to test the site before launch: does it load quickly, and does the content display well in all browsers and mobile devices?
6. To attract customers, Run ads on the sites your audience often visits.
2 thoughts on “A Brief Guide On How To Build A Business Website”