So You Need a Website?

  1. Determine your goals for the website and products/services
  2. Choose and purchase a descriptive domain name
  3. Create a brand, logo and theme to match your business and goals
  4. Choose a platform and a hosting company
  5. Design your website using a customizable theme
  6. Build your website’s architecture with menus and pages
  7. Write your content and create your photo library
  8. Publish and go live!
Step 1. Determine your goals for the website and products/services

Your first question to yourself should be why. Why are you creating a website? What’s the primary purpose and what will this site do?

A website is one of the primary sales and marketing tools, so you must address the purpose to make sure your design accomplishes this purpose and the website’s goals.

Some reasons we build a website are following:

  • Site will be for e-commerce to sell products
  • Site will collect email addresses for direct marketing
  • Site will be just used for business cards to establish a web presence
  • Site will be primary way of showcasing a product through videos and other content
  • Site will be a blog to share information
  • Decide up front what your reasons are so the site layout can be sure to address the full needs and goals.
Step 2. Choose and purchase a descriptive domain name

Choosing a domain is one of the most important decision you will need to make. It will be your address on the internet and will represent your company, products and services. Some rules to follow:

  • Make it descriptive. If it isn’t your personal name for a personal blog, or a company name that is recognizable, make it a descriptive name of your product or service
  • Make it memorable. You’ll want this to be a big part of your marketing campaign, so you’ll want an easy to remember domain name that people can pick up after the first time they hear it
  • Make it easy to spell and say. Avoid using hyphens and numbers or making it so long that it’s hard to spell and type
  • Buy the .com, .org, and .net so others won’t use your name for nefarious activity or to siphon off sales from your site
  • If you’re selling internationally, make sure your domain name isn’t something bad in another language

If the domain name that you absolutely want is taken, sometimes you can bid to buy it. This is not recommended as some abuse this and it can be too expensive. Keep searching and you will find the right domain name. Run it by several of your confidants to make sure they do not see any of the above issues.

Step 3. Create a brand, logo to match your business and goals

Your first project design will be to create a logo and a brand. You’ll want to create a logo that represents your company’s personality and product or service. There are several free logo websites online to help you create a logo, but this is something you may want to pay for. And developing your brand is more than just a logo so invest in creating a color and font guide that your company will use.

Overall, make sure your logo represents your company, has a wide appeal, is original and then develop it in several file formats to use on print and web.

Step 4. Choose a platform and a hosting company

If you choose to build your own website and you don’t have the background in creating a website, you’ll want to choose a platform and hosting company that provides good technical support and an easy to use program to build the website.

WordPress is free. It happens to be the largest platform. It is customizable, so you can create a professional website with a somewhat low to a medium level of a learning curve. It is widely used so lots of development of plugins and enhanced tools are available for it. It receives regular updates for functionality and security. There are other platforms, but WordPress is the largest and fastest to get your site up and running.

  • There are lots of hosting companies but not all are created equal. You’ll want to choose a hosting company that offers affordable plans. Many offer year 1 of inexpensive rates only to hit you with much higher rates for following years to renew
  • Speed of platform is important
  • Look for a company that has technical support hours that match your time zone and has live persons to provide you with support. Many will just provide email support.

Hosting plans come with different offerings so choose the right plan for your goals.

Step 5. Design your website using a customizable theme

You are now ready to start designing your website. Using a theme template is a shortcut to designing your dream website. If you’ve chosen the right hosting company and platform such as WordPress on BlueHost.com, you can easily choose a website theme that you can purchase and sometimes for free, install and use. These themes should match your goals and branding so spend some time choosing the right theme. Again, if you spend on a theme, you will be more than rewarded with a stylish website that is likely the first thing a customer will see about your company or product.

Step 6. Build your website’s architecture with menus and pages

As you build your site, be sure to address all your goals. The homepage is the most important page and sometimes customers do not go beyond this so make sure it has all the important information you want to convey but do so in a clean, stylish and concise way. Most people don’t like to read a lot of text, but you can convey a lot with a photo and a caption.

Your menus should be easy to navigate and do not burry information in sub menus. If it’s important information, put it right up top of any page or any menu. There is no guarantee your customer will click to see more.

The minimum suggested pages are the following:

  • Homepage – we covered this above
  • Contact Us – you’ll want to make it easy for your customer to reach you. Provide an email, phone and physical address if that applies
  • Products/Services – this could be done through text, photos or video. Your e-commerce site must have all of these
  • About Us – customers want to buy from someone they know and has a reputation. So, tell them who you are

Some additional menu items can include a blog or news section to provide the latest information about your products or happenings.

Step 7. Write your content and create your photo library

A picture is worth a thousand words they say. So, select photos that say what you’re trying to say or sell. Video can be an even bigger enhancement. Just remember video slows down the loading time of a website. Also, customers may not watch more that 60 seconds of a video. So, choose the right length of time and content to make a big impact. There are lots of sites that offer free photos and some website theme templates will also have photos included in them.

Your text should be easy to read and to follow. Again, average time spent on a page is just a few seconds so don’t write a novel, unless that’s what you want to sell.

Step 8. Publish and go live!

You’ve finished your website, tested it on multiple computers and mobile devices, reviewed and edited any mistakes and now you’re ready to go live. You’re now ready to tell the world that your website is available.

As a follow up to going live, make sure you have an analytics program tracking the use of your website especially if you’re offering products. The analytics will tell you what you need to improve by showing you what’s working and what’s not working.

If you’re a business owner that just finished reading this article and would rather spend your time marketing and conducting other important business needs and don’t have the time to learn all about website development, please reach out to our team for a hassle-free process to customize and build your dream website.