You know that your business needs to be online, but creating a website can be intimidating if you’ve never done it before. Learning how everything falls in place and how to move this there and that there, it can be a little overwhelming. The good news is that people just like you learn how to build their own websites every day. Before you get started, here are 5 questions to answer when creating a website for your business.
1. What Do I Want to Achieve?
Of course, when you start your website for your business, you want to get more business. More than that though, what is the role that your website is going to play? Will your website be a FAQ site where you help customers better understand your services or products? Will you have samples of your work? Are you introducing your team of professionals to the world?
Knowing what you want to achieve will help you put actionable steps in place so that you can work toward your goals in a way that makes sense. Starting a website without a clear objective and plan is a recipe for website disaster.
If you aren’t sure what is best practice in your industry, head over to Google. Do searches for your competition. Who is ranking well? What is their strategy? If it is already working, it is at least worth the time to do the research and see what it is that they are doing.
2. What Is the Best Option for Building My Website?
Once you have it all sorted in terms of what you want to achieve with your website, you need to figure out where you are going to build your website. There are many options and more coming out every day. There’s Wix, WordPress, Weebly and the list goes on.
The biggest problem is that all of these sites use terms that you don’t understand. How can you be sure that you are using the best option for your website?
The best way to ensure that you are using a great site is to research and see what the experts say.
If you look at the majority of websites online, you will see that over 30% of the internet runs on WordPress. This means a huge market share for WordPress and for good reason, they are one of the best ways (if not the best) to build a website that you can customize and grow as big as you would like.
You should understand that there is a big difference between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org, however. While these sites have the same name, the .com version is very limited in terms of how you can customize, you do not own your site and if you are using the free version, they will host ads on your website. WordPress.org is the platform that you want to use since you have free reign of how you operate, you own your site and if ads are there, it is because you put them there and you are earning revenue from them.
3. Which Hosting Platform Will I Use?
There are just as many options for hosting as there are for building your website. It can be confusing to look through the sea of hosting options, but make sure that you find a host that has a good reputation.
When you buy hosting, you can either buying use of a remote shared computer to put your files or a dedicated server for your files.
You will also see options for the amount of use you will have for the hosting. While you may be able to get away with a small package in the beginning, as your site grows, you need to make sure that you are ready to increase your hosting or else you may have a very slow website.
4. Should My Business Website Have a Blog?
When you are building your website and toying with the idea of starting a blog, you need to have one. Inbound marketing is becoming more and more popular these days and the reason it is so popular is because it works. Not only does it work, but compared to other forms of advertising, it can be very inexpensive.
Blogging is a great way for you to get in touch and stay in touch with your audience. You can provide them with helpful information so they can be educated on your topic and build trust with them throughout the buying cycle.
5. Will I Need Outside Help On My Project?
If this is the first website that you have built, you may run into some things that you don’t understand. Thankfully, there is a whole web of helpful information out there for do-it-yourselfers. You can watch videos, read tutorials and most often figure things out on your own. If you do need help, there are many web developers that are happy to come in and work on that piece of the project to help you get back on track.
Conclusion
Making sure that your business has a high quality website is essential in the 21st century. Businesses that do not have websites cause people to raise an eyebrow and wonder why they aren’t online and having a less than attractive website isn’t much better. If you use WordPress.org, there are plenty of themes and customizations to make sure that your website is professional and functioning well for your customers.
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