TABLE OF CONTENTS
Read our quick and easy guide to learn how to create a website for a small business. We’ll walk you through important design considerations, useful tools, and how to make your site live.
How to Create a Website: A Step-by-Step Guide to Guide You
Your website is the most effective sales and marketing tool in your arsenal. In just five easy(ish) steps, you can create a beautiful personal or business website that engages visitors and excites them to work with you. Here’s how to get started.
1. Choose a domain name
A domain is the unique name of your website.
You can choose any name you want, but it’s best to have one that matches your business or professional name. Not only does this keep your brand consistent, but it can also significantly affect how you appear in search engine results. A good domain name can help you rank higher, which can increase the number of people who click through to your site.
While you’re brainstorming domain names, listen to these helpful tips:
- Include keywords relevant to your business to increase your visibility in search engines.
- Make sure it’s easy to pronounce.
- If you’re having trouble brainstorming, use a domain name generator as a jumping off point.
- Keep your domain short to make it easier for visitors to remember.
- Avoid abbreviations, acronyms, hyphens and numbers.
- Aim to use traditional top-level domains or TLDs, such as .com or .net or one that best relates to you or your business.
- Make sure no one else is already using it. While you can buy a domain from someone else, it can be expensive. It may be better to choose a different name or use a different top-level domain, such as .net.
2. Register your domain and choose your design and hosting providers
Once you’ve decided on a domain name, you’ll need to register it with a domain registrar. You can do this by using a website like Domain.com or Network Solutions. Keep in mind that these providers simply register the domain ownership for you, which can cost between INR 500 and INR 1000 per year, depending on your TLD.
You’ll still need to find another provider to host the URL where you’ll build your website, and you can use another program to design it. To simplify things, you can choose to register your domain with a provider that offers registration, hosting and design capabilities.
If you don’t have much or any coding experience, you may want an all-in-one option like WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix.
If you choose to use separate companies to manage your web hosting and design, look for a hosting service that offers benefits such as technical support, a free domain name, or a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate.
You should give SSL certificate a lot of weight as it is a global standard security technology that enables a secure connection and protects your and your visitors’ sensitive data and information. Simply put, this security measure adds the S in HTTPS to the front of a website’s URL. Search engines and visitors see it well.
These features are more common with all-in-one providers, but there’s no guarantee, so make sure the one you choose offers them before buying a plan.
Popular web hosts with and without built-in design integrations are Bluehost, DreamHost, GoDaddy, and InMotion.
If your web host doesn’t offer any integration features, some third-party design software to consider are Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud apps. You can create templates on these platforms and embed them on your websites.
3. Add useful pages and attractive content
You have many options when it comes to how you organize your content about your business and its services.
That said, try to include these important pages on your website:
- An amazing home page. The central hub of your business website should captivate people and tell them exactly what you do and who you serve. Include attractive graphics, readable fonts, concise and clear descriptions, and compelling calls to action.
- An enlightening “About Us” page. Share your business origin story. Highlight your achievements, mission and values. You can also introduce each team member to foster deeper connections with customers.
- Booking or store page. Drive more revenue and integrate a third-party online scheduling platform or an e-commerce platform, such as HoneyBook or WooCommerce.
- An accessible contact page. Include social media accounts, emails, phone numbers, addresses and a contact form to make it easy for people to contact you. If it suits your business, add your hours of operation as well.
- Unforgettable content. Sharing compelling content establishes you as an expert in your industry and helps grow a loyal community for your business. This can include blogs, videos, podcast episodes, case studies and more. As a bonus, this content can help increase your ranking in search results and increase site visitors.
- A powerful FAQ page. Answering common questions not only helps build more trust with your brand, but can also reduce the number of phone calls and support tickets you receive.
- Testimonials and press coverage. Increase your credibility by sharing your successes. Create a page that shares positive reviews of your services and include any mentions of your business in popular media outlets.
4. Optimize your website for search engines
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of refining your business website so that your pages rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), especially Google. It’s what helps people find you.
As you build your website, keep these basic SEO practices in mind to increase your visibility and drive more traffic:
- Use relevant phrases, called keywords, throughout your posts and pages. However, don’t use keywords just for the sake of them. Make sure your choices are intentional. Excessive usage can negatively affect your rankings.
- Continually publish valuable content for your customers or readers.
- Conduct routine content audits or cleanups to see what you can consolidate or refresh.
- Keep your website loading speed as low as possible by optimizing images or enabling browser caching. These changes can help your website rank higher in search engine results. You can measure your site speed on GTmetrix. (Learn more about the importance of website loading speed.)
- Make sure your design and content work properly on computers, mobile phones and tablets. Don’t underestimate the performance of your website on mobile devices. Up to half of internet traffic now comes from smartphones.
It’s great to have a beautifully designed business website, but search engines want to see more than that to establish your authority when indexing it in their search results.
While optimizing your site for search, be sure to keep your visitors in mind. You’ll want to choose simple navigation systems and build pages that allow for fast load times. To accommodate a range of user abilities, follow Census of India guidelines to make your site as accessible as possible.
5. Review your page before you hit ‘Publish’
Before you launch your website into the real world, you’ll need to test it to make sure it works as it should.
Among other things, make sure that:
- Proofread your content to make sure everything is correct and error-free.
- Check for any broken links.
- Remove any filler content from your website theme or template.
- Test your website across browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and more.
- Connect your website to Google Analytics to monitor its performance.
Once you’re ready, hit publish. To help drive traffic to your newly created website, share it with friends, market it to customers, and include it on your LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media profiles.
Keep your site up to date
You’re not done with your site the minute you hit publish. To stay high in the search rankings and improve the visitor experience, you will need to constantly maintain your website. Consider adding the following to your webmaster to-do list:
- Use webmaster and analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to monitor how people use your site. Some website engagement metrics to track include bounce rates, click-through rates, and average session duration.
- Update your website regularly with blog posts, products and promotional offers.
- Conduct monthly reviews to ensure that all aspects of your website, including internal and external links, pages and plugins, are working as intended.
- Update your About page with new team members or achievements.
Over time, you may want to foster relationships with other business sites to build credibility and improve your SEO. When other important websites link to your website, search engines see your site as more credible and worthy of ranking higher in the results.
