With very limited exceptions, websites are critical to a business, yet large numbers of business owners haven’t pulled together a real website to promote their offerings. The internet itself is partly to blame since you can pull samples and portfolios from other sources, but until you have your own website to point potential clients to, it’s hard to justify your own professionalism and experience to would-be clients.

Building a Simple Website

While building a website might be intimidating at times, there’s really no reason for the complexity of the task to overwhelm you. You’ll really just need to set aside the time to learn how to work with a basic program like Wordpress. Wordpress websites are among the simplest to learn and they can have outstanding results as well. All you need is your own domain and a clever template and you’re off and running.

Branding and SEO

Before you actually start building a website, you should do your homework. If you’re offering a service, you’re probably hoping that a lot of clients will find you and save you the trouble of contacting them directly. If this is what you’re hoping for, you’ll want to research keywords to find out what those in the industry are actually searching for. For example, building a website billing yourself as a “graphic designer” puts you in competition against graphic designers of every color, creed, credibility and ability.

Being a “graphic designer in Los Angeles” will not only give you more credibility with your perspective audience since they know you’re a real person with a real business, but you’ll also benefit from higher ranking in the search engines than you would with a more generic keyword – unless you’re outstanding in SEO as well as design which would be sometime to put on your portfolio as well.

Even if you’re not interested in search engine optimization, you should still research enough that you can build a brand around your new domain name.  Your brand will probably involve logos, graphics and an online business presence that will eventually precede you as your business grows. Plan a potential brand carefully before registering a new domain name – it may only take an extra twenty minutes, but that time will be well spent.

Building a Website

Once you have a domain name, install Wordpress on the site. There are some nice tutorials on the Wordpress website to help you do this – it’s surprisingly simple. Once installed, you can start to fill in the content creating pages – not posts – to give your site more permanence. The pages will appear much like traditional website pages and you still have the option of adding blog posts later if you’d like to add new content or update your portfolio with announcements.

As you create your pages, set one as your homepage and set that page as your static homepage. Once it’s set up as a static page, the visitor won’t be able to tell you’re (1) using a blog as your website and (2) that you’ve created a basic website with a nice professional appearance in less than four hours. 

Update Your Website

After building the basics of the website, it’s your job to be sure it’s up to date and doing the job you envisioned. Add to your portfolio as new work becomes available. Update your resume there on your site and bring in new customers with updated blog posts, content and customer testimonials. A website is constantly evolving, so leave time in your marketing plan every week to be sure you’re managing your website correctly. 

Rebecca Garland is a professional freelance writer working hard to populate the internet with meaningful, interesting content. With advanced degrees in information science and business, Rebecca enjoys a variety of topics ranging from education to email archiving. Learn more about Rebecca on her professional website, www.internetauthor.net.