Whether it is a hardware store, departmental store or an IT business, you need to have a website for your business. It is an important part of digital marketing that becomes the foundation for all the other operations you carry out such as selling, promoting, uploading business updates and so on.
It helps you put your business in perspective, giving you the base for your everyday tasks to be done with ease. With a functional website, you can reach the success of your business systematically.
However, if you wish to build a website, it has to be done perfectly while taking care of every detail that goes into it. You need to include all the sections that can help your user with information; making it user friendly for all your potential customers should be the ultimate goal.
If you’re just starting out or want to develop a website further that’s already in use, you’re at the right place.
In this article, we have put together a short guide consisting of simple yet effective steps to develop a website that’s sure to impress your customers. Follow these steps precisely and have your website stand out from the rest in no time.
Let’s get started!
Four Steps to Create a Great Online Business Website
1. A Good Domain Name
The most important step before you even begin to think about developing a website is to think of an apt domain name. Also known as your website address, a domain name is exactly like the entry point to your website. We cannot emphasise enough that having a good domain name – it makes up for your first impression as well as contributes towards usability purposes and good SEO.
Below, we’ve listed a few tips to help you come up with a good domain name:
- Keep the name as simple as possible, without complicated spellings or using extremely difficult words.
- Keep it short
- Always remember to use the appropriate domain extension (.com, or .gov, .edu etc – depending on the business)
- People tend to use numbers and characters – avoid it. They are hard to remember while making your domain look less elegant. They also make it difficult to vocalise the name when required.
- Make sure to include your vision in this name. This means that if you’re planning to add more variety of products than what you sell, keep the name generic enough to do so. For instance – it is Amazon.co.uk and not BooksOnline.co.uk; allowing amazon to sell everything plus books on their website.
- No repetition. You need to do thorough research on whether your idea of a domain name already exists or not. If it does, search a little further to know if it has a trademark. If you’re still confused, always contact the website designers.
- Lastly, make sure it is SEO friendly. Contact the experts and ask for advice; it only gets better if you choose to do things professionally right from the beginning.
While these are some of the many tips, we’re sure that the expert website genies know better. Make sure to take their advice before landing upon one name.
2. Content on Your Website
The first and foremost thing that your content should cover is a clear and simple description explaining your business, appearing right in front of your eyes when the homepage appears on users’ screens. Make sure to add apt visual banners, images and representations of your business in the best way possible to communicate with your customers through optical means.
Next, add proper sections such as the about us page, product and services drop down and so on. Having the right segregation of sections containing useful information also makes your website user friendly – an important part to be able to serve in a better way to your customers.
We have enlisted a few insights on how to develop a website that leaves a positive impression on your customer. In other words, to create a user-friendly website, you should –
- Write content that is easy to understand and read, and has good graphics and fonts that look professional.
- The graphics should be well optimised and compressed for enabling your user to load them faster. If you don’t do that, your website will be slow and search engines like google will penalise your ranking.
- Refer to your competitor’s websites to understand what format they use, the kind of content that increases engagement, their web design and so on to use similar compenents for your website.
- Have throrough research to understand who your target audience is and update your website accordingly.
- Call to action pages are a must; also include ‘book an appointment’ or ‘click to buy’ sections.
A few components to include in your website, for your assistance:
- Home
- About us
- Products and / or services
- Sitemap
- Contact us
- Additional pages that are relevant to your website.
It is easy to plan these strategies, but when it comes to implementation, the challenges come right at you.
Our only advice – make sure to take expert help if you feel stuck anywhere in the process!
3. Optimisation of Your Website
Once everything is set, you need SEO – a process of undertaking different strategies applied to your website to rank it above your competitors.
Once the search engine crawls through your website, it looks for other websites that have, more or less, similar content. The better your content, site design and SEO friendliness website has, the better the chances of ranking higher than all the other similar websites.
For your assistance, we’ve listed a few features of SEO to give you a better insight into what it entails.
- The basis – keyword research and application.
- Compressed content image for quick website loading
- Having a mobile-friendly website
- Scoring high-quality backlinks for your website
- Using online directories to give you good reviews
- Using internal linking in your website content
- Using social media for links
To make a remarkable digital presence, you need to be on your best game with current ways of enhancing your visibility. Amongst many others, SEO is by far the most important and organic way to rank your website better on google search engine and also in other search engines. If done correctly, your website will spike up in a few months and give you long time benefits in terms of conversions.
However, it is not a quick way (prefer looking at paid ads if you want instant results) of ranking your website better, SEO is an ongoing process that can make your website stay at top with consistent content addition and other SEO services. It can increase your traffic, naturally bringing in the additional scope of conversion.
4. A Website Maintenance Plan
If you’re putting in a good amount of effort and money to develop a website that looks great, has necessary information and literally defines your business, you should look into creating an efficient website maintenance plan for your business.
In order to have a successful and working website, you need to take care of the maintenance aspect of it as well. You wouldn’t want a great ranking website to get hacked now, would you?
Here, we’ve listed a few tips to help you create your bespoke website maintenance plan:
- There are several Webmaster tools available, make sure you use them at least once a month to correct any mistakes that you might have unknowingly made.
- Use the current website traffic to understand your target audience a little better
- Make sure your website and all the software are up to date
- Use the ‘split testing’ on your overall website to ensure uploading content that works the best within your target audience. For example, if you have a certain product to sell, you might have two similar landing pages with different kinds of content and images. If you split test them, you are assisted with data that can tell you which page is doing better than the other, in terms of conversion rate.
- Purchase a quality security scanner to make sure your website is clean of malware and other hackers for safety reasons.
- Regular SEO and continual addition of quality content.
- Keep yourself updated with trending ways of keeping your online presence strong.
- Take regular feedback from other website experts
- Make sure you’re all caught up with your latest competitions all the time. Update your website to match its content.
- Lastly, make sure to always have multiple backups updated everyday, including the past 10 days’ data.
A maintenance plan for your website will always be bespoke, created in a way to cater to your preferences and the type of business you have.
However, the tips that we’ve mentioned above are generic and crucial for all kinds of businesses, so make sure you cover them in your website maintenance plan.
Conclusion
You might be feeling overwhelmed after intaking so much information; a simple process to develop a website can have so many intricacies, who would have thought?
But we’re here to tell you that you shouldn’t worry too much about it, there are experts in almost every detail that goes into making a website a grand success. If you follow the above-mentioned steps carefully, you will have the chance to ace the online platforms and receive positive conversions into your business.