Taking the First Steps Towards a Business Website that Works for You

So you have made the decision to have a website for your business, that is one of the best choices a modern business can make to propel their online presence and start to gain a wider audience for their products and services.

Of course to have a website you need your domain name and that should be either your business name or something similar to allow for easy and successful searching in search engines like Google. It is quite easy to search for available domain names on many domain provider websites and with the constantly expanding extensions becoming available, there are more choices than ever before for a domain name. A handy tip is to remember that whatever your domain name, try reading it out to someone verbally, as this is what will be required when you hand out your website address or email address over the phone. Too many times an overly clever domain name can lead to more confusion for your customers, so choose wisely.

The next step is to work out the purpose of your website and start planning how you will achieve that with the design and functionality of your business website. For example if you were planning to simply educate your viewers of your services and where you are located, while promoting them to get in touch via email or phone, then you would not need to add a eCommerce shopping cart to your website. With regards to a business website we find that it is typically simplicity that works best, find your message and then work out how to tell everyone in the easiest way possible.

Once your website is built you then have to host it, you may find that there are many options here, but generally it’s best to seek the advice of your developer on where they recommend hosting your website. As a rule of thumb we recommend hosting with a reputable hosting company that has redundancy in the event of a hardware failure or loss of internet, this will allow your website to stay online 24/7.

So you have a website that is well designed, hosted and live for the world to view, now you have to tell everyone it’s there. What do I mean by tell everyone you may ask? I do not mean go outside and yell down the road, but rather to start preparing a SEO campaign to have your website listed on suitable and relevant directories. A good SEO campaign will also encompass many other aspects for optimising your website and linking it to appropriate websites to allow it to rank for keywords in popular search engines, such as Google and Yahoo.

It’s important to market your new business website after you have built it, because even the best house in the street has a street number to tell people where it is. The common belief that if you build it, they will come is just not the case with websites, the volume of websites is just too large for that to even be a possibility, that is why Google and other search engines help us find what we are searching for online.

Start planning your business website and start working on your businesses next stage of success.