How to Create a Business Website

Building a website for your business is vital for success. Here’s how it’s done…

What do karate teachers and plumbers have in common? They both need a website for their businesses to succeed in 2021 and beyond. In truth, the same can be said for any type of business.

Well-thought-out web design could be the difference between your business rising above the competition or falling by the wayside. No, really. Research has shown that 75% of internet users admit to making judgements about a company’s credibility based on its web design.

We’ve designed a step-by-step guide on how to create a business website from start to finish. We’ve also included expert tips and some information on the best web design companies, who can help give your business website the edge. And if you want to know how much it will all cost you, check out our comprehensive guide for website costs.

1. Decide on Your Website’s Purpose

Do you want to feature collections of your artwork, sell your products, or simply display your contact information? Whichever purpose you choose for your website, you must clearly demonstrate on your homepage what your website’s trying to do. 

Defining a clear purpose will help visitors understand what your website is about. It will also build a solid foundation for a positive user experience (UX). Why? Because the less time your visitors spend scrolling and clicking for answers, the better. The sheer number of how many small businesses have a website means you'll want to do all you can to stand out from the competition.

2. Pick a Domain Name

Choosing the right website address, or domain name, is almost as important as deciding on the name of your business. It’s usually the first thing users see about your business, so make it count.

Ideally, your domain name will just be the name of your business. But if you decide to use something different, just make sure it accurately reflects the purpose of your business and offers a good first impression to users. Below are some tips on how to choose a domain that delivers the goods…

✔ Keep it short – short and sweet domains are easier to remember

✔ Check the price – use domain registrars to check the price of your domain (you may even need to purchase yours from another user if it’s a popular domain)

✔ Use ‘.com’ – it’s the most reputable and established domain name extension

✔ Research the domain name – use tools such as US Trademark Search to find out whether your desired domain name is being used or contains registered trademarks

To register your domain, you’ll need to visit a domain registrar such as GoDaddy, Domain.com, or Bluehost.

In terms of website costs, your domain will be a yearly subscription, priced somewhere between $10 and $20 per year, depending on the popularity of the domain.

3. Choose a Web Host

Web hosts provide a digital space for your website to be viewed on the World Wide Web. Without a host, your website won’t run. It will usually cost anywhere between $2 and $300 per month, depending on the type of hosting you want and the provider you use.

From our years of extensive research into the wonderful world of US web design and hosting, we can confidently recommend these three web hosting providers to power your business website:

• HostGator
• GoDaddy 
• Bluehost

But which type of hosting is right for you? For most small business websites, we recommend VPS hosting (details to follow), but we’ll discuss the most common types of hosting below…

Shared Hosting

Typically costing between $2 and $5 per month, using this type of hosting means you’ll be sharing the servers and web hosting resources with other websites. It’s restrictive and provides little room for growth. For that reason, we’d recommend against shared hosting.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) – Our Recommendation

Striking a balance between the affordability of shared hosting and the scalability of dedicated hosting is VPS.

Costing between $20 and $50 per month, VPS hosting means sharing the server with far fewer users than on shared hosting. This freedom grants your website access to a greater allocation of resources – such as disk space, memory, and bandwidth – that can help your site run more efficiently.

VPS is suitable for websites that are looking to grow quickly, but don’t yet require the resources (or expensive fees) that come with dedicated hosting.

Dedicated Hosting

Only suitable for high-performance websites, dedicated hosting can cost up to $2,000 per month. Your website has its very own server, enabling your business to run at full capacity online. The price tag is normally too high for small businesses, so we’d recommend aiming for dedicated hosting further down the line.

4. Build Your Pages

Small business website design is all about keeping things simple. We don’t mean plain or boring, but simple in terms of helping the user to navigate your site and take any desired actions as easily as possible. That’s to say, don’t try to reinvent the wheel with a website that risks being confusing, cluttered, or chaotic.

In terms of pages, your business website should really include:

✔ Homepage

✔ Contact page

✔ About us page

You should also consider adding a blog (we’ll discuss the benefits later) and a products page if you want to sell online. Below, we’ve got some tips for web page perfection.

Your Homepage

As we mentioned earlier, your homepage should clearly explain how your business works and what your website is there to do. In terms of design, less is more. Using minimalist design and lots of whitespace will help the user get from A to Z without any unnecessary clicks.

For example, if you’re building a website for your coffee bean delivery subscription service, you should consider adding a concise description of your service, along with eye-catching call to action (CTA) buttons such as ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Get Started’, etc.

70% of small business websites lack a CTA button on their homepage, which means they’re losing out on God knows how many sales or sign-ups. Our advice? Be part of that wily 30% who are using CTA buttons.

Website visitors love videos. Studies show that users spend 88% more time on pages with videos, and you can create one easily using tools such as Lumen5.

It’s really important that your homepage wows visitors. Otherwise, you’ll likely see your bounce rate rise and your profits fall. If you don’t have the skills to build a sleek homepage yourself, then you should consider hiring an expert to build one that visitors will definitely love.

We can help you find affordable web design experts to help you build your business website. All you need to do is tell us what you’d like from your website, and we’ll find web designers to suit your needs. They’ll then offer free, no-obligation quotes for you to compare. It’s the quickest, easiest way to compare the right options for your next website. And it’s free!

Your Contact Page

Again, keep it simple. The contact page is where you’ll likely turn website visitors into clients and customers, so you don’t want to add any unnecessary roadblocks (i.e. making your contact information hard to find) to that conversion highway.

Your contact page should include:

✔ Phone number

✔ Email address

✔ Physical address (ideally with an integrated map showing your location)

Your contact page doesn’t need to be boring, though. Check out the page below: an example of how you can spice up your contact page without losing sight of the end goal – asking visitors to contact you.

Your ‘About Us’ Page

Writing an ‘About Us’ page will help differentiate your business website from the competition. This page helps users to understand you, the person or people behind the business, which may help them choose your company over another.

Your ‘About Us’ page should describe:

✔ Who you are

✔ What you do

✔ How you do it

✔ Where it all began

Don’t think adding this page is important? We spoke with UX designer Heather Brick, from marketing company MVF Global, about the importance of adding that human touch to your business website:

“More than ever, people want to be sure that the site they’re visiting is honest and credible, and that there really is someone there on the other side of the screen!

With this in mind, my top UX recommendation is to make the content of your site as easily digestible, transparent, and human as possible.

This means using language that is accessible, friendly, and even conversational where appropriate, refraining from using industry jargon. This applies to the labelling of your menu items, to the wording of your call-to-action buttons, to the voice and tone of your sentences.”

Your Blog

Whether you name your blog page ‘News’, ‘Press’, or ‘Articles’, regularly adding high-quality content to your website brings value to both your business and visitors. Here are the main reasons to consider blogging:

✔ Drive traffic to your website – Sharing high-quality content online gives users more opportunities to click directly through to your website.

✔ Great for SEO – Blogging about relevant topics that users want to read can help to improve the position of your web pages on the SERPs (search engine results pages).

✔ Bolster your social media marketing – Sharing blog posts on social media is an effective way to generate a buzz around your brand and increase website traffic.

5. Optimize for Search Engines

SEO involves employing many different tactics to help improve the visibility of your website online. Below are the easiest ranking factors to implement, helping to improve your site’s position on the SERPs and bring you more traffic:

• Use keywords in your content and URL – These are popular words or terms that users are searching for related to your industry. Use tools such as Semrush to find these words and use them sparingly in your content, and within your URLs (web page addresses) and meta titles and descriptions (the snippets of content, shown on the SERPs, that describe your web pages).

• Get an SSL certificate – Google ranks secure websites higher than non-secure sites (most hosting providers offer SSL certificates for free).

• Design mobile-friendly pages – That’s when the page reformats to display clearly on mobile devices (web designers can do this easily for you).

• Use internal links – Keep users on your site and reading your content by linking to your different web pages throughout your site

• Compress your images – Use free tools such as TinyPNG to help improve your page-loading speed (which is a Google ranking factor) by keeping your images as small in file size as possible

• ‘Trim down’ your code – Remove any code that isn’t completely necessary to improve your loading speeds.

Haven’t got the coding skills? Not to worry, you’re not alone. You can always ask a web designer to trim the code down for you.

Does SEO sound like a step too far for your busy schedule? Remember, you can always find a web designer to handle everything for you. After all, successful SEO tactics can be the catalyst for turning your small business website into the next big thing.

6. Install Analytics Tools

We’ve shown you how to create a business website, so now it’s time to explain how you can measure your site’s performance. Doing this will help inform your decisions when making updates or changes to your website.

There are a number of tools that help you analyze your traffic and overall site performance, such as Google Analytics and Search Console.

These tools enable you to view things like:

• Number of views on each page of your site
• Average time users spend on your site
• Daily, weekly, and monthly visitor numbers
• Broken links on your website that need to be fixed
• The keywords that brought users to your web pages
• Bounce rate (when users return to the search engine after only viewing one page on your website)

7. Test and Publish

Before you share your brilliant business website with the online world, you need to make sure it works without a hitch. A poorly functioning or crashed website can be disastrous for your brand image, so it’s vital that you test, test, test.

First off, check your site loads quickly on all the major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge. During these checks, make sure your images and videos load, and that your content formats correctly.

If anything looks awry, make the necessary adjustments and get your business website back in ship shape before you publish.

This is a really critical stage for ensuring your cybersecurity safeguards are in place. If your website stores customer data of any kind – emails, passwords, credit cards – you'll need to ensure it's all protected from cyber criminals.

8. Promote Your Site

Things would be pretty easy if you could just publish your site, sit back, and watch traffic bottleneck into your website. In reality, you need to start marketing your website to bring in the clicks and cash. 

You’ve already learned how to promote your website through SEO using keywords (in Step 5), but there are plenty of effective ways to bolster your marketing efforts, including posting on social media and using PPC advertising (pay-per-click).

Post on Social Media

Over half the planet’s population uses social media. That’s how posting about your new website on social media and co. can help bring you lots of traffic. For every small business, we recommend creating business accounts on:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn 

Along with your non-promotional posts, you should always update your social media followers about any website changes or new blog posts when they happen (with links to your website, of course). You should also include links to your social media channels on your website. 

Use PPC Advertising

A type of search engine marketing (SEM), PPC involves paying Google Ads or Bing Ads each time a user clicks on your link. You ‘bid’ on certain keywords or phrases to have your website appear when users search those terms.

The more you pay, the higher up on the SERPs your links will appear. So, if one user searches ‘Karate teacher Iowa’, your Iowa-based karate teaching service website will appear higher than the competition if you’ve bid higher for that specific search term.

You’ll normally pay between $1 and $2 per click, but it can cost slightly more depending on the popularity of your chosen keywords, for example, when lots of other businesses want to bid on those words, too.

You can also use Google or Bing Ads to make sure your links are only shown to certain users. This is called demographic targeting, in which you have your web pages appear only to specific users based on metrics like their location, age, and gender.

9. Create a Maintenance Plan

Once you’ve published, you’ll need to maintain your website to ensure long-term success. Remember the analytics tools we discussed in Step 6? You’ll want to check Google Analytics and Search Console at least once a month to see how your site’s performing, and to identify where or how you can make improvements.

We also recommend installing Optimizely to run A/B tests. This is when you divert half your website visitors to a ‘test’ page or element, and half to the original page. You can then see which version of your website gets the most positive reaction, judging certain metrics like clicks, conversions, and time spent on page.

Recommended Web Design Agencies

73% of companies invest in design to help their brand stand out from the competition – and for good reason. A website that’s been expertly crafted will leave its sloppy counterparts in the dust.

Most business owners don’t have the time or expertise to build a sleek website from scratch, which is why it’s a good idea to hire an extra pair of web designing hands to give your business that edge. We’ve selected a few of the best web design agencies in the US today for you to check out.

Hibu

Dotcom Design

Web.Com

Next Steps

This guide has shown you how to create a business website, from deciding on your site’s purpose to implementing a maintenance plan. Before we go further, let’s recap those steps…

How to Create a Business Website in 9 Steps

1. Decide on your website’s purpose
2. Pick a domain name
3. Choose a web host
4. Build your pages
5. Optimize for search engines
6. Install analytics tools
7. Test and publish
8. Promote your website
9. Create a maintenance plan

We’ve given you all the information and tips you need to build a business website that shines online, but, like many business owners, you may not have the time, energy, or skills to craft your site from scratch. If that’s the case, you can always hire a web design expert to handle the legwork for you and create a stunning website to boost your brand image.

Sound good? To get started, you’ll just need to tell us what you want from your new business website, and we’ll match you up with web design agencies that can cater to your exact web design needs. You’ll then hear from web designers with bespoke, no-obligation quotes for you to compare. This is the easiest, quickest way to ensure you find the right designer for your business website. Oh, and it’s free to get started!