In the digital ecosystem, the businesses are considering the website development as an investment rather than an expense realizing the broad spectrum of benefits it offers. Building a website is not only about coding. Instead, it’s an art of science that requires a well-thought strategy and well-planned execution.
If the business start-ups are looking to go online with website development, then creating an engaging website themselves is not an easy deal. To get effective results, businesses can take the help of Trady.com, a great website development company. However, the start-ups need to take care of a couple of things to make the final results impressive. Here are the steps that small businesses should take to sustain and leapfrog the competition.
10 Steps to Get Build the Small Business Website
- Get the optimal domain name
The domain name is a website address that makes the website a good fit for search engines and showcases website usability to the users. The selection of a business domain name such as incorporating a brand name with a popular TLD extension like .com is difficult because a large number of businesses register the website with a .com TLD extension. Considering other TLD extensions like- .net, .org, .store, and others can help start-ups secure the domain name of their preference.
Creating a good domain name must be short, easy to spell, not include any hyphens, convey a broad purpose, and be meaningful so that it becomes memorable and facilitate scalability. Try to keep it SEO-friendly to improve SERP.
- Buy website hosting
The website needs to host to make it visible on the internet. The web hosting service provider facilitates businesses to choose the hosting plan and go online. Businesses when connect the domain name with hosting services, their website address gets stored on the hosting account. In this way, when users browse the website link, the hosting services showcase the website.
The hosting service providers facilitate customer support so that businesses get an answer to the queries or issues immediately. The scalability and security are the major factors that must be checked.
There are different types of hosting plans that businesses can choose from-
- A Shared hosting server plan involves the business getting a shared server and resources that impact the website performance because all the websites hosted on the server use the shared space.
- Dedicated server hosting includes a complete server machine that host the website which means the website dedicatedly uses the server machine and resources entirely. It makes it an expensive option.
- A Virtual private server hosting plan is about providing one of the virtual machines to the website dedicatedly that enable the business to enjoy high performance and security at a reasonable cost.
- Tell your brand story
Nowadays, people are more interested in brands that determine who they are, what they offer, and how their offerings are useful to the customers. The homepage is the front face of the company where businesses should visually and textually describe the company’s services that benefits the end-users.
The services pages and introductory pages link must be easily accessible so that users can get to the page they are looking for. The videos or timelines are also famous for telling who you are.
- Incorporate CMS
CMS is software that’s used to create and manage content without having technical expertise. Different CMSs are available to meet various business needs followed by their weakness and strengths. WordPress, Drupal, WooCommerce, and Shopify are some of the CMS that also provides templates, development tools, hosting, domain, and customization facility to build a website that’s a reflection of what the start-up envisioned.
Wix, GoDaddy, Squarespace, and Weebly are all-in-one website builders that won’t require entrepreneurs to be tech geeks to stay on top of content management. These platforms charge a fee to enjoy the CMS services.
- Build the custom website
Building a custom website is important for businesses to display their offerings uniquely. Choosing Wix, Weebly, WordPress or GoDaddy allows you getting built the intuitive website that businesses are looking for. The businesses can choose the template, customize it (Add, modify or delete the pages, and configure header and footer), and launch the website.
At some point, the businesses need to hire tech talent to build 100% custom website, then building in-house team is not a cost-effective option. That’s where outsourcing development and design task to the custom web development companies is better, which help businesses to build every element the way they want.
- Craft the intuitive UI
The unique website design stays for a long time in the users’ memory and makes them interested in visiting the website repetitively. During UI design engineering, businesses must ensure that an optimal number of magnificent graphics is created with aptly sized fonts. The graphics must be optimized so that they won’t increase the website loading time.
The competition research helps you know which design elements and components are bringing better results. The navigation structure must be hierarchical which enables users to easily find categories, sub-categories, and products. Incorporate CTAs in the right place to get maximum results.
- SEO-optimize the website
Without indexing and ranking the website on search engines, you cannot make the business website easily searchable by the target audience. Making the website SEO-optimized with the best practices such as keyword research, high performance, mobile-friendliness, secure coding, quality backlinks, proper internal links, and social media links enable the website gets crawled by the search engine bots.
SEO optimization is not a one-time process. The consistent optimization of all the SEO elements is important to keep the website on the top of the search engine pages and drive maximum traffic. The positive reviews improves the website’s credibility, which is considered as an important factor by the search engine crawlers.
- Keep the website content fresh
Similar to making the website SEO-ready forever, the website content should be kept fresh to keep the users visiting the store. The blogs or article publishing plays a vital role in ranking the website high by striking the balance between content freshness and quantity. Releasing new and relevant content on the website continuously helps start-ups acquire new customers and improve retention.
In addition to blog posts, the users’ testimonials are a good way to generate quality content related to offerings that make the business- the center of attraction.
- Launch the website
Before publishing the website, testing for usability, performance, security, scalability, and other parameters is vital to ensure it performs as expected after the launch. The beta release could help in gaining user responses so that desired changes are made to the website, which makes it a favorite of their customers.
- Analyze the performance
The businesses employ the analytics tools such as Google Analytics, webmaster tools, and Google search engine Console that provide website performance and traffic-related details on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It helps in finding broken links and errors on the website. The number of views and average time spent on each page, and bounce rate showcase what’s deterring and making users interested in different website pages.
Conclusion
It’s high time to build a business website to open a digital storefront to cater to the needs of digital customers. Complementing the physical store with an online presence boost the brand awareness and fuel up sales. The small businesses can do it themselves following aforementioned tips that saves huge bucks. However, if the project complexity makes things difficult, the Web development companies can help in building a fully-functional website that meets the gaps and allows businesses to focus on important activities. Also, get an estimate for website development costs before teaming up with the company so that the website gets developed within budget and timeline.
