How to Make a Small Business Website

Before you start to dive into building your website, a key and essential part of this process are to make sure you figure out your business, sales, and marketing goals for the near future. When you do this, you can then match your business goals with what you want to get out of your new website. This will help provide focus, and you can figure out what exact features and services you need on your new website and understand what impact they may have. 

Your website is not about you; it is about your clients and targeted audience. When diving into a new website design, you should build client personas and learn about what your clients and target audience do online, what they need to succeed, and how your website and online presence can help them meet their goals. Client Personas will also allow you to focus on how best to plan out your new website's design and development. 

Next is to figure out what your domain name is for your new website. Here are a couple of links below on how to find your perfect domain name. We recommend registering your domain with GoDaddy as they have been the easiest to work with when it comes to domain name registration. 

Figure out the infrastructure, the bones of your new website. Whether you do it on paper or use an application, you want to plan out what pages you want, and you want to figure out the best way to navigate your website visitors through your new website.  Start by building a sitemap and keep the number of pages you want in the main navigation menu to seven. The base pages you want include the Home page, About Page, Services Page, Contact Page, and Blog. 

No matter what website builder you are using, you will want to optimize your website to be found on Google (And Bing). The first item you will want to do is do some keyword research based upon the pages you have decided to add to your new website. Once you complete your keyword research, you will want to add the SEO features based on the website builder you are using. This most likely includes adding a meta title and a meta description for each page. 

After your structure is finalized, now it is time to create content that will help convert your visitors to do what you want them to do. When writing your content, you want to personalize it, and you want the soul of your business, non-profit, or event government agency to come through. Remember to make sure you are writing for your customer and make sure it is about them and what you will do for them. You also want to make sure you add trust signals like testimonials, reviews, certifications that add credability to your website.  

Now you have your content; you want to plan out the design of your website. This includes choosing a layout, colors, images, and fonts that will help you stand out from your competition. You also want to make sure you research what designs concept will resonate with your clients. 

Once your website is live, you want to ensure it is secure by implementing standard technologies such as an SSL certificate and any vulnerability scanning tools, especially if you have a website built on WordPress. You also want to make sure you have a privacy policy page and terms of use page. This is important as there are several privacy regulations in place that you also have to learn about to ensure your business is protected. 

Now you need to get people to your website. Build a plan to promote your website based on your budget and the industry you are in. Promoting your website may include:

• Promote it on Social Media.
• Email marketing.
• Use paid advertising.
• Maximize your search engine capability. 

Now your website is live does not mean the hard work of getting the most out of it is not done. Now you need to make sure you keep track of your site's performance based upon the key metrics you established and optimizing it as you go. Your business goals may change, technology changes, and your business performance changes, so make sure you optimize as needed.