It is a common term in the marketing world that a company’s website is ‘the cornerstone’ of your digital marketing strategy. If your company is not online, to many potential customers, you do not exist. However, setting up a website makes web design nowadays quick, cost-efficient (all while having that professional look and feel). Read this easy-to-follow guide to creating a website to get your online business booming.
Table of Contents
Create a goal
Depending on your industry, your company’s goals may vary. For example, a charity’s goal will differ from a restaurant’s. Either way, it is essential to set the end goal.
This is the planning phase. Ask yourself questions to determine your goal. What do you want this website to achieve for your business? Meaning, how can this website help you to achieve your marketing goals. What pages do you need? Common pages to have include: Home, About, Products/Services, and Contact. How you lay out your pages will affect the navigation process of your visitors, which consequently affects your Google ranking on the results page.
How do you reflect the business’s brand? This concerns factors such as the colour palette, fonts, your company logo and the tone used on the website. A good tip is to consider any other content you want customers to see while visiting your site, e.g. reviews/graphics. Consider also the style. What do you want your website to look like? This preparation will save time and resources.
Find a website builder
To build your website, you can either find a website builder or hire a website developer. Opting for a website developer is a more hands-off approach, whereas using a website builder involves you in every step from planning to publishing. There are numerous website builders out there today: GoDaddy, Weebly, Wix.com and WordPress. While offering a variety of themes, many website builders offer website hosting and domain registration services.
However, should you have the money (but not the time), you may opt to hire a web developer to build your website for you. This can be from an agency or independently contracted. However, it is still vital that you set out your website goals in order for your developer to create the website you envision.
Choose a template the reflects your brand
Website builders offer a variety of templates. You do not necessarily have to stick with those suggested for your industry. An advantage is that you are able to modify the template to suit your goals. Additionally, the created templates are responsive or mobile-friendly. This means websites built using templates will automatically adjust their layout, image and text sizes, and proportions to fit smartphone/tablet screens.
Create the pages you need
You decide on what pages you want included on your website. Thanks to the innovative tools on website builders and the skills of web developers, creating pages is not too complicated. Start with your Home page. Here you can welcome visitors, show them important content and direct them around your site. From this, build on more pages. An important tip is to include simple and specific calls-to-action (CTAs). Meaning, invite your visitors to perform an action- that you want. This can be subscribing to the newsletter or downloading the menu.
Review and publish
Before you click the “publish” button, remember to first preview your site. This provides you with an opportunity to spot any mistakes before your site goes live. Ask friends, colleagues and relatives to test your site. A fresh pair of eyes may spot errors you previously overlooked.
Maintain, update and optimise
Once your site is live, unfortunately the work does not stop there. Feedback from your customers, new campaigns and website analytics may lead you to alter your site for increased optimisation. Relevant updates must be performed, content must be updated to improve SEO and website back ups must be done.
Therefore, creating a website for your company can be completed in a few steps (or in less if you opt for a developer). The effort, time and money gone into building the site and maintaining it are far outweighed by the benefits reaped by being visible online.