“Do I need a website for my business?” Well, the answer is YES. You do need a website for your business. A good company website will professionally be designed, lead magnet, sales booster, brand-differentiating.
People look online for information that will help them make smarter purchasing decisions. This behaviour emphasizes the importance of a website.
You may not realize it, but the public judges every business by a specific criterion: do they have a website or not. If they do, they’re probably a serious business.
If they don’t, they’re probably a small-time business or just starting.
Importance of a Website for Your Business
The business world has evolved and grown leaps and bounds. Any business needs to have a website these days.
Website is the most effective and cheapest form of marketing that you can have for your business. There are many ways of using your website for your business.
Here are few points that support the benefits of having a Website:
Importance of a Website for Marketing
A website is the best possible tool for marketing a product or service; this is true even if you are a small business owner and even if you’re in beginning stage.
A website allows you to reach a wider audience than you could with traditional marketing alone.
Having a business website is a great way to establish yourself as an expert since a website shows you’re willing to put in the time and effort to be successful and it’s increase your online presence as well.
A website is where your target market will come to know about you, your products and your services.
Let’s start with your social media marketing. It’s not enough to just be on social media; you need a website where you can collect your visitors’ information and interact with them directly.
You use social media channel like Facebook and Twitter to reach and engage with customers; now, you need to have a place to send customers when they want to learn more about your business or services.
For example, We post on social media like “we are a website design company,” but if they want to know more about our services or working process, then they can learn more by following the link with that post.
Email marketing is an essential aspect of digital marketing, and a website plays a vital role in this.
If you are using email marketing to reach and engage with your users, you need a place to send them to convert.
Your paid campaigns like Google ads (PPC) also need a place to land after a click on an ad that may be your website or landing page.
Importance of a Website for Sales
Design a website is not enough to bring paying customers to your business.
You need good traffic to your website to get more qualified leads who are more likely to make a purchase, and you can achieve this through search engine optimization of your website.
With the help of a website, you can sell your products and services 24*7.
You don’t need to be actively engaging with leads because they can get the information they need from your site initially.
Your website serves as an additional salesperson, helping customers get more information about your product they need and convincing them of your products or services’ benefits.
A website works for you around the clock, even when you and your team are on holiday. Website is always working hard with a constant passion for bringing more customers to your business.
Website for increase Building Credibility
Most consumers treat a business more credible with a website than companies with social media profiles or just listing on directories.
You can build strong relationships with your consumers by providing valuable and educational content. E.g. everyone knows “How to Run a Refrigerator?,” but still, you get a guide to explain the working style of the product.
This creates a good value in terms of belief and authority. Same like this, you can also provide information and guides to educate potential customers about your services or products.
How to Get Started with a Website for Your Business.
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- Decide your domain name.
- Choose a web host.
- Create an Email Address
- Choose a Content Management System (CMS)
- Choose a good e-commerce platform (if applicable)
- Build your pages.
- Test and publish your website.
Decide your domain name
A domain name is one of the essential things on your website.
It’s a simple URL which you will use to showcase your work and explain your products and services. You can share this URL with your current and potential clients and promote it on social media.
It would be best if you tried to keep it short and clear of abbreviations, numbers, easy to remember and type-in.
Always try to choose a top-level domain (TLD) for your business website. If your desired domain name has already been taken, you can use prefix and suffix with your domain name like my, best, top, pro, get.
Many professional and location-based names have grown in recent years, such as .marketing, .travel, .agency, .in.
Once you’ve selected your domain name, you can purchase it through a domain registrar. These are some popular domain registrars:
Choose a web host
After selecting the domain name, now time to choose the best host for your website. A host is a server where all your website data is stored for the public to access anytime.
Many options are available in the market, depending on your budget. A shared web hosting is less expensive and the cheapest option to host the website.
Shared hosting means you will share a server with other websites. Dedicates hosting is a costly but reliable option but not suggest for small business websites or personal blogs.
Another option is Cloud hosting, which spread your website data across multiple, interconnected servers. It’s faster than shared hosting and a cheap option as compared to a dedicated server.
These are some best options for web hosting services:
- Bluehost (shared, cloud and dedicated hosting options)
- WPinfy (For Cloud hosting)
- WPami (For Cloud hosting)
Create an Email Address
To make your business look more reliable and professional, you will need a custom business email address based on your domain.
For example email address like name@yourdomain.com makes your business more established and credible than yourname@gmail.com.
A setup of a custom business email address is quick and easy. We suggest you two best options for this, Google Workspace (Gsuite – Gmail for businesses) and another one is ZOHO.
Pricing of Google Workspace is started from ₹125 per user per month, and ZOHO starts from ₹58.33 per user per month.
Choose a Content Management System (CMS)
A content management system (CMS) helps create, manage, and modify content on a website without specialized technical knowledge.
Another way, a content management system is a tool that allows you to build a website without needing to write all the code from scratch.
WordPress is the most popular content management system, and it maintains approx 40% market share on websites.
WordPress has a vast collection of themes and plugins to extend your website’s functionality with an active support community.
WordPress can create small business websites to complex websites and blogs. Most website developers are familiar with it, so it is easy to find a freelancer or agency that can work on your site.
Choose a good e-commerce platform (if applicable)
If you plan on selling physical products or digital services through your website, you will need the right eCommerce platform to do this.
A website provides information about a business and its products and services. On the other hand, an eCommerce website lets people buy products and services directly from a business, regardless of location.
Here are some popular small business e-commerce platforms:
WooCommerce:
WooCommerce is one of the world’s most popular and open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is designed for small to large-sized online businesses using WordPress. WooCommerce can turn your WordPress website into an online store.
There are many free and premium themes available for WooCommerce, but it is better to use a reputable developer’s premium theme because of better security and support.
And if you are not from a technical background, you can hire a WordPress developer to help you set it up and use it.
Shopify:
Shopify is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that allows you to create, manage and customize an online store. You can manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping on a single platform. It is a standalone platform hosted on the Shopify server.
Build your pages
Just as every business is different, every business website will be different. Still, when it comes to creating website pages for your business, there is a set of standard web pages which all small business websites should have.
Here is a list of the most common pages that every website should have:
- About Us
- Our Services
- FAQ Page
- Contact Us
- Blog
- Privacy Policy
- Terms & Conditions
- Sitemap
Apart from website pages, it would help if you had a good logo, business cards, and social media profiles. These things will help your potential customers identify your company quickly on the web or search engines.
Test and publish your website
Before the site lives on the web, make sure your website works on all major browsers like Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Open every page of the website and ensure all images and content show up correctly. Repeat this process whenever you update your site; this process saves you from visitors’ future complaints website.
You need to check every link of the website, including internal and external links also.
