Guide to Building a Website for your Small Business

Being a small business owner comes with all forms of responsibilities. But one chief responsibility is expansion. After all, nobody wants their business to be a stagnant entity. The digital world is a great place to achieve just that. Through the usage of the internet, it’s now possible for any business, however big or small it is, to connect to a much wider and more diverse audience. But the first step in conquering the digital space is to build a website for your business.

A website is a central point of reference for customers, potential customers, potential clients or partners, so on and so forth. It is thus vital that you have an attractive and professional-looking website to compliment your business. Let’s take a look at the steps to take to build a website for your small business

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Choose a Platform

A website requires a host. Since it’s not practical for a small business to have independent servers to host the website, third-party hosts come in handy. Examples of this include Wix, WordPress, Blogger, Squarespace, GoDaddy, etc. Along with an independent website, it’s important to have a business email. A custom business email address that purely incorporates the name of your business is vital to gain credibility and stand out professionally. An example would be abc@yourbusinessname.com rather than xyz@gmail.com or something along those lines.

You can use Wix for this. Some website builders offer tools that help you create a business email. For instance, a Wix business email can be created by simply creating a website on Wix and using the Purchase Mailbox option. This is a fantastic and time-efficient way to create your own business email that is linked to your business website.

Purchase your domain

Your website’s domain name should be in the name of your business, without any usage of confusing abbreviations that’s not part of the public image your business has. Do verify if it’s available or if it’s taken. We don’t want to end up with any trademark infringement issues. In case it is taken, it’s possible to contact the owners and request to purchase it from them. Or slight modifications to the domain name should make it work.

Be mindful of extensions. Extensions refer to the .com, .net, .biz, .org, or whichever suffix appears at the end of the website address. You can always go for the safe route with a .com extension. But at the end of the day, you must choose the extension that’s the most relevant to your business, so that it all fits and works together perfectly. It would be ideal if your domain name is SEO optimized, which gives it a higher ranking on search engines, making it more likely to be visited.

Themes & Templates

Now that you have your own domain, it’s time to build your website cosmetically. Thanks to a myriad of both free and paid templates, one doesn’t require any coding knowledge to do so. Choose the template best suited to your business’s requirements and a color scheme that’s in line with the soul of your business. Here, the details do matter. This includes the fonts and color of the text. Use your business’s logo as your site’s icon and make sure it forms a prominent part of the face of your website.

Content

Now, this is the essence of your business’s digital identity. Whatever content you post will have a lasting impact on the viewers and this must be handled with care. It’s vital to post regularly, but it’s also important to maintain fixed pages filled with information that’s less likely to change or fluctuate. These will act as pillars to the image that your business projects. Whatever image you use in posts and pages should be of high quality and must be attractive in terms of complementing the theme of the rest of the website.

Marketing

Now that you have a website, it’s time to market it. Marketing here refers to the act of bringing in people to visit your website. There are many ways to do this. Chief among them being SEO optimization. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Whichever post you make or whatever content you post should ideally be SEO optimized with the right keywords, so that search engines like Google are likely to rank your site higher on their list, thus increasing views. Then there’s social media marketing where social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc are used with the link of your website attached, to directly market your website as well as your business.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve built a website for your business, it’s all about working hard, keeping it updated, and patiently waiting for growth. Traditional brick-and-mortar businesses all benefit from having a digital presence as the internet is what potential customers or clients utilize for doing easy research work. Thus, a website is a fantastic investment of some money and a lot of time for a digitally connected and prosperous future ahead!

Read more: Why Choose WordPress as Your Website-Building Platform in 2021