A website can provide another powerful marketing channel for your business if you take the time to set it up correctly. If you have a service-based business, a website should get you more calls and appointments for your service. If you sell products – digital or tangible – you’ll have an online store that is open 24/7.
Whether you have a new business or you have been in business for a while, you absolutely should have a website that is working for you.
Ways to Establish Online Presence
Options for creating a business website include hiring freelance web developers or even professional agencies. Professional agencies, because of their high overheads, will generally be the most expensive option, whereas freelancers will be much less costly.
If you are someone who has some spare time and you are not afraid of a little technical jargon, you can always build a quality, functional website by yourself. There are several good websites that offer eBooks and online courses that will walk you through all the steps from beginning to end.
Building a business website yourself, or at least most of it and getting help in certain areas may be the most cost-effective solution, especially for new startups and small businesses.
Understanding Website Success Factors
Launching, or even re-launching, a profitable business website that ranks well in the search engines involves understanding and implementing some fundamental ideas that ensure high probability of success, as described below.
Website / Blog Foundation
There are certain elements and best practices that have been proven to make web sites easy to build, functional, and reliable:
- Choose a good website address, also known as a domain name. It should be short, easy to say and remember, and suitably describe your business or service.
- Use a reliable web hosting company such as BlueHost. A small, relatively inexpensive starter package will generally suffice.
- Use WordPress for website and blogging platform. It is free, easy to use, and easy to extend.
- Use a premium WordPress theme to create a professional, attractive, and aesthetically correct website in terms of colors and fonts. After all, “you never get a second chance to create a first impression – Unknown”.
- Use an auto-responder such as Mailchimp. This component will capture your client emails allowing you to create additional marketing opportunities for your service or business. You can offer newsletters or industry-specific reports in exchange for client emails.
- Monitor visitors to your website so you can continually improve search engine rankings, build on the strengths of the site, and minimize its weaknesses.
Website Design and User Experience
The website design and user experience that it provides to visitors has become more important than ever. Great business websites that deliver a magnificent user experience will rank higher in the search engines resulting in more visitors and potential customers to your website.
The following are just some website design features that contribute to a good user experience:
- Mobile responsive design. For retail shops, service businesses, and restaurants, it is vitally important that their business website is mobile accessible via smartphones, iPads, and Android devices. The use of such devices to access websites is expected to increase over the coming years.
- Create good content on a regular basis. This content should be informative and valuable to the visitors of your website. Creating a blog component is a great way to publish articles and engage readers.
- Make your website content easy to find. Use good navigational schemes so that website visitors always know where they are and what to do next.
- Create an about page and a contact page, and place your contact phone number on every page so that your website visitors can get in touch with you.
Website Traffic Strategies
Most website owners consider traffic, i.e. how to get visitors to the site, as an after-thought once the website is fully functional. This is generally a mistake because without visitors, even a good website offering great user experience, will not fulfill its goals of getting you new customers. Consider how long a store-front business would survive without foot traffic.
It is important to have a website traffic strategy in place early on in the website development process. Implementing appropriate traffic-building strategies should be a daily activity.
Know What You Can Do For Your Business Website
There is a lot to consider and accomplish when building a business website, a lot of which you can do by yourself. The main area where you will benefit from additional help is online marketing. A well thought out online marketing strategy will help your website get better search engine rankings and more potential customers to your website.
Nilesh Peshawaria is a regular contributor at trotterway.com where he writes about creating and maintaining professional websites using WordPress and the Genesis Framework.