Introduction
You're sitting at your desk, maybe with a cup of coffee or tea in hand, ready to finally tackle building your business website. Maybe you've been here before. Maybe you signed up for a website builder, but you didn't know where to start. Maybe you started, but got lost in the details.
Building a website can be easy, that's what website builders were designed for, after all, but building a successful, performant website for your business, one that will impress customers, and drive conversions, is hard, especially if you've never done it before.
That's where we come in, to lend you a helping hand. Even if you don't use a bespoke service like our own, our step-by-step guide will help you get off to a running start, and set you up for success.
What Makes a Website
The first thing you should be aware of is that a website is a long term investment. A website is the sum of a lot individual parts. There's the domain, an SSL certificate, hosting, the design, the build, your content, mobile support, accessibility concerns, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), performance optimisations, third party integrations (for example Google Maps), analytics, sitemaps, and more.
Now this might sound like a lot of work to take on, but the bright side of this, especially for small businesses that can't dedicate a lot of time and resources up front, is that you don't have to do it all at once. You can build a small website, cover the basics, and then iterate. This is where the long term investment comes in. Regular content and website updates tell Google, and other search engines, that your business is active. It will help you stay relevant in the eyes of SEO.
Where To Start
Let's get to the nitty gritty. You've recently started a business, or you've been at it for a while, and you need a website. Here are the first few things you need to look into:
- Choose a domain
- Choose a host, or builder
- Choose a template
Choose a Domain
This should be as close to your registered business name as possible, unless you're trading under a different name, in which case it should match your trading name.
Try for a .com domain, or alternatively your country's own TLD. TLD stands for Top-Level Domain, it's the final part of a domain. If your business name is taken, try adding a word relevant to your industry, but try to keep the domain as short as possible.
Short domains are easy to remember, look good in signatures and on stationary, and appear more professional.
A domain that describes your business is ideal, for example, londoncyclerepair.com.
Choose a Host, or Builder
We won't spend too much time on this, as this really deserves its own blog post.
This is where your website will live. You can choose from any number of popular website builders, like Wix or Squarespace, you can choose from a more traditional hosting service, like GoDaddy or Hostinger (which also offer their own builders), or you can hire an agency, or contractor, to build you a custom website.
What's the difference between the likes of Wix or Squarespace, and GoDaddy or Hostinger? Wix and Squarespace are website builders first, which include hosting, whereas GoDaddy and Hostinger are hosts first, where you can host custom websites, and they offer builders as a secondary service. The former will have more advanced, robust builders, while the latter will have more extensive hosting services.
There are a few things to consider when choosing where to host your website, but for now, let's break it down into three simple options:
- If you know very little about about building a website, and you want to spend as little as possible, choose a builder, like Wix or Squarespace.
- If you're a bit more technically inclined, and you can install your own CMS, like WordPress, choose a hosting service like GoDaddy or Hostinger.
- If you want the get the absolute most from your website, if you want to stand out and really impress your customers, choose a capable agency or contractor.
Choose a Template
Most builders will include a list of templates you can choose from for your website. There might be some free ones to use, included in the price of your package, and there might be some premium ones you can bolt on. Regardless of the price, remember these templates are sold to all of the builder's customers, so chances are there will be other business websites that look very similar, if not identical, to your own.
If you've gone with a host, and are installing your own website platform, like WordPress, you might want to install a WordPress theme. Theme, template, or design, are all interchangeable terms, and refer to the colours, icons, and layout of your website. There are many websites that offer WordPress themes, just try a simple Google search and you're sure to find at least a few.
This part is important. Make sure the template works for mobile and desktop screens, and everything in between. In an ideal world, the template should be responsive, meaning that it adapts to the screen as the screen is being resized. Some templates provided by builders will only adjust to the screen once the page is refreshed. That's not great, but it's better than nothing. Websites that don't respond well to mobile screens are heavily penalised in search engine results.
Your Content
Congratulations, you've got the basics out of the way! Taking that first step is often the hardest part, so we're off to a great start. We've still got a few things to do before your business website is up and running, ready for your customers to browse, so let's jump right into it.
Next, we're going to focus on your content. By now you've got a template selected, and you need fill it with meaningful words and eye-catching images. Here's what you need:
- A home page
- An about page
- A list of your services
- Examples of your work
- Contact info
- Testimonials
These are your core essentials. Remember how we said you could start small? Once you have this content ready, you're ready to launch. Customers and search engines can start learning about your business, and you can update your website periodically to expand its functionality and content.
A Home Page
A home page is essentially a summary of your business. You want to quickly spell out what you do, who you are, and make your contact info easy to find. It's a good idea to have a Contact Us link near the top of your page, and another one near the bottom, as part of the header and footer that will appear on every page of your website. That way, no matter where the user is, the moment they decide they want to get in touch with you, they don't have to look very far.
If you have them, add a few testimonials here too. Even if you've only got one or two, they can go a long way in convincing potential customers that you're the right choice. You can link to your Google, TrustPilot, Yell/Yelp, or other ratings here as well.
If you have examples of your work, like photos of services rendered, add a small gallery, and link through to a dedicated page to showcase your work in all its glory. If your business provides products, drop a few of your best selling, most popular, or recently released products on the home page to highlight their availability.
Try to keep your homepage short and concise. You'll have other pages on your website that can delve into greater detail about your business and your services or products. Visitors shouldn't get lost scrolling through your home page, searching for the content that they're after.
An About Page
This is where you can go into more detail about you and your business. You can shine a spotlight on your employees, outline the values you stand for, share your years of expertise, and more. This is where your customers will come to learn more about who they're doing business with, so make sure it's a worthy self-portrait!
A List of Your Services
The services page will likely be one of the top viewed pages of your website. Your services are, after all, what your potential customers are after. You'll want to outline your services with a detailed description. You can combine these descriptions with examples of your work, which you can link through to the next page for additional viewing.
Examples of Your Work
This is where you'll showcase your work in all its glory. You don't have to showcase all your work, especially if there's a lot of it, just pick the best of the best. If there's too much to scroll through, it will all start to look the same, and you might lose the customer's attention.
If you're a brand new business, like us, you might not have a lot to showcase. Don't worry, instead of showing work you've done for customers, show some work you've done for yourself, friends, or family. You don't have to explain who the work was for, just explain the work itself. You can also create something special just to show off on this page. It's better to have something here, rather than nothing at all.
Contact Info
This page is straightforward. It should have your email address, and your phone number. If you have a physical storefront, then you'll want to share your address, and display a Google Map with a pin to easily find directions to your store. Depending on your locality, as a registered company, even if you don't have a storefront for customers to visit, you may still have to share your company's address.
For ease of use, you can also add a contact form to this page. Provide a field for the customer's name, email, telephone, and their message. If you'd like, you can add this contact form to your website's footer, but it's just as easy to have a link or button that always stands out, that links your customers through to the contact page.
Testimonials
Testimonials drive conversions. While that can be said for almost anything we've discussed so far, testimonials (or reviews, or references) humanise your business and build trust. Ideally, your testimonials will be linked to a third party service, like Google Reviews or Feefo, which will lend them some much needed credibility.
Why a dedicated testimonials page, if you've already added them to your homepage? Remember, the homepage is a succinct summary of your business. Having a dedicated testimonials page will allow you to share more of your customers' positive feedback about your business, and it will make that feedback stand out, and easy to find.
E-Commerce
If you're not building an e-commerce website, feel free to skip to the next section.
Building a successful e-commerce website can be a very big undertaking. E-commerce is another one of those topics that deserves its own blog post, or even a series of blog posts, but let's cover the basics. We can start off with a solid foundation, one that can built upon, brick by brick, at a future date.
When building a digital storefront, there are few extra boxes to tick. First, if you're an e-commerce, product based business, you probably don't need a list of your services or examples of your work, your products will speak to that.
The following list is your basic requirements for an e-commerce website. You've probably visited an e-commerce website before, so these might feel obvious, but in the interest of being thorough, we'll list them and talk through why they're important. If you've opted for an e-commerce package with a website builder, all these item should be included, just remember to set them up!
- Product listing page
- Product detail page
- Basket & checkout
- User accounts
Product Listing Page
This is your product catalogue. Most e-commerce websites will present their products as a grid of cards. Each card should click through to a product detail page, and each card should have at the minimum:
- A product image
- The product name
- The product price
You can also add:
- An 'Add to Basket' button
- A short product description
- The average customer rating
Additionally, unless you have very few products, the product listing page should have:
- Search
- Filters
- Sorting
- Pagination
Making your products easy to browse, and easy to find, is key. Customers expect to be able to search for, filter, and sort products. This is as good a time as any to mention user experience, known as UX for short. It's a very important metric to keep in mind when building your website. UX is ease of use, familiarity, and flow. Your goal is to build a website that's not frustrating or confusing to use.
Product Detail Page
When a customer clicks through to a product detail page, they are expecting to find more information about your product. The detail page should contain:
- Additional product images
- A longer product description
- Product specifications (for example dimensions, materials, or weight)
- The product rating with full customer reviews
- The product price
- An 'Add to Basket' button
If you'd like, you can also add:
- Related products
- Frequently bought together
These last two will be dependent on your builder's features and functionality. They don't necessarily need to use any sort of complicated logic system that looks through your sales and groups products automatically. You can simply add related and frequently bought together products manually to your product detail page, to tempt your customers into additional purchases!
Basket & Checkout
The basket page is the customer's last chance to review their purchase, adjust quantities, or remove items entirely, before submitting the payment. It doesn't need much more than that. If you'd like, your basket can incorporate voucher codes, which you can use for promotions. There is a certain satisfaction in adding a promo code to an online purchase, and seeing the price drop!
User Accounts
You don't have to necessarily offer user accounts, you can allow guest checkout instead, but they do come with a lot of benefits. Returning customers won't have to enter their details, like name, address, or payment details, over and over again. User accounts can also have a purchase history, and if you really want to dive into the deeper end of customer retention, you can offer loyalty rewards for each purchase.
Bonus Checklist
We've gone through a lot so far, but there's still more you can do, to help your website really thrive! Any good agency, or web developer, will know this:
- Blog About It
- Accessibility
- Certifications & awards
Blog About It
A blog section can form a part of your regular content updates strategy. Blogs are a great way to share your expertise and increase your authority on certain topics. They are fantastic for user engagement, and raising your profile through content sharing by social media platforms.
Blogs can also have a big impact on SEO. When users engage with your blogs, they spend more time on your website. Google, and other search engines, interpret this as engagement, and the higher your engagement, the higher you will rank in search results.
Accessibility
You may not realise it, but about 16% of the global population has a disability, which means a significant portion of web users will encounter barriers and challenges to browsing the internet. Accessibility is the measure of how well your website functions for all types of users, including those with visual, auditory, or other disabilities.
Without accessibility features, for some users, your website might as well not exist. Luckily, your builder of choice will have a lot of accessibility features built in. You can help by making sure all your images have descriptive alternative text, and your background and text colours have good contrast, for easy reading.
Needless to say, there's a lot more to accessibility than descriptive text and colours. You can measure how well your website scores for accessibility with tools like PageSpeed Insights.
On top of accessibility, PageSpeed Insights will also test for performance, best practices, and SEO. If you score 90 or above on all the metrics, then you're very likely doing better than most of your competitors!
Certifications & Awards
If you have any certifications, awards, or even partnerships, make sure to show them off! This can be as simple as adding the logos to the header or footer. Like with reviews or testimonials, they can make a great impression on your customers.
Final Tips
As you might have guessed by now, web development is a very extensive topic. While we've touched on all the basics, and some more advanced topics, web development is really a series of rabbit holes we could easily get lost in. We have end this blog post somewhere, so here are three final tips:
Analytics
Regularly review your analytics. You might need to install something like Google Analytics. They will give you insights into how people are using your website, which of your pages are most popular, and what kind of content resonates with your users best. You can then adjust your content strategy to keep those views and leads coming.
Search Console
Register for Google's Search Console. The Search Console provides insights into how your website is performing on Google Search. You can track which keywords bring visitors to your site, your average position in the search results, and more.
Business Profile
If you haven't yet, create a business profile on Google, Bing, Yell/Yelp, and other business directories. You'll get more eyes on your business, and consequently more eyes on your website. You'll also be able to manage things like the telephone number and business hours on those providers' services (like Google Maps).
Conclusion
That was a long read, but building a successful website is a long process. Remember, a website can start off small, with just the essentials, but a website truly thrives when it's updated and maintained regularly. Try to set aside some time to work on your website, even if it's only once or twice a month. You can always come back to this article, check what's next down the list, and tick off items one by one.
If you do it right, your investment in your website will pay dividends.
