In today’s hypercompetitive era, moving your business into a digital world is a key to success. Creating user-friendly websites and working on social media is an optimal solution to boost the worth of your business and spread its name among the masses.
Especially, the significance of websites can’t be denied. They are a great way to build brand awareness and showcase your brand to potential customers. Your website helps you establish your solidified brand image by telling the world who you are and what it represents.
There is nothing better than a well-developed website to provide reliable information for the customers, which can help you set your business apart from the rest. Here are 10 steps that will help you know how to set up a website that is novel to your business and represents its highest standard.
How to Create and Maintain a Website
Following are the essential steps to create a website that is unique, user-friendly, attention-grabbing, convert potential buyers into guaranteed customers, and trigger more business opportunities:
1. Opt for a Catchy and Easy to Remember Domain Name
Your domain name (also known as your website address) is often your entry point to your site. Your domain name must make a positive impression, both for usability and search engine optimization (SEO).
Make sure that it should be easy to spell and not a tongue-twisting word having many syllables. You shouldn’t choose slang or esoteric terms. Do thorough research and choose the shorter name. You might use the abbreviation of your company name as a domain address. Avoid using senseless words and wrong spellings. It is recommended that you should go for .com as for priority.
Avoid hyphens and numbers. Make it easily memorable. Avoid using nonsensical names. Make sure the URL is SEO-friendly and boosts research. It should convey a message so users know what you are all about.
2. Choose High-quality, Scalable and Secure Hosting
Website host, also known as a website hosting provider, is a company that provides the technology and services needed to make a website accessible on the internet. Your domain name is connected to your hosting provider, so users can visit your website address and see the website you have stored on your account.
Hosting services can run anywhere from $2 to $100+ per month depending on what technology you use and the support you need. You can purchase a shared server hosting plan starting at $2 per month. However, I wouldn’t recommend it. You share a server with other customers which can cause your website to slow down.
The most expensive option is a “dedicated host” hosting package. It can cost between $100 and $2,000 per month, but it will make your website work optimally. A dedicated server plan gives you the ability to use all of the server resources for your site. It is also more secure than shared hosting plans.
A “virtual personal server” (VPS), hosting plan is the compromise. It offers the best of both web and hosting. It costs between $20 and $50 per month. This is reasonable for the services you’ll receive.
So that you can get help quickly, make sure your hosting company offers phone support and tech support. You should check to make sure that server security is in place on any server you are interested in. Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) is required to allow you to access your server.
These are some of the most popular web hosting companies:
- Namecheap
- GoDaddy
- DreamHost
- Bluehost
3. Display Information About Your Business
Website is the most idealistic and fuss-free way to make your information available online. So that people don’t feel lost when visiting your small business website, it is essential to tell them who you are and what you do. Your main homepage banner and any subsequent banners are visual representations of your services. Also, include an “About Us” page in the footer navigation links so people can click them to learn more about your business.
4. Make Your Website User-friendly and Easy to Navigate
Increase your ROI and customer engagement rate by making your website user-friendly and providing navigation links on the header and footer. Another important step is to make the search console of your website an easy way to find anything related to your services and products. These little things can make big differences and keep customers intact with your business website.
5. Choose and Implement the Best Content Management System
A content management system (CMS), is a program or application that allows you to manage and create digital content. You don’t need to have any technical knowledge to use a CMS. A CMS can help you manage your website. Choose a CMS that suits your needs. Different CMS systems can be used for different purposes, including a budget, extensibility, user-friendliness, and cost.
These Are Some of the Most Popular Systems
- WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world. It has an active support group and many plugins that can be used to enhance the functionality of your website. If you can’t find the plugin you need, you can easily find a WordPress developer to make it for you. WordPress is free and easy to install.
- Drupal is another popular CMS. It has many of the same advantages as WordPress: flexibility, ease of use, and a large support network. It is more secure than WordPress and can be used to protect your website from malicious activity.
- Joomla! It is more SEO-friendly, secure, and multilingual than WordPress. However, WordPress can be improved upon with a few plugins.
- Wix is an alternative to Squarespace but is more user-friendly. You can subscribe to it monthly but not annually and get similar features. Wix also has drag-and-drop functionality.
- Many other CMS can be used such as Blogspot, Weebly and Squarespace, etc. You can opt for any content management system that seems suitable for you and help you create a user-friendly website.
6. Choosing the Best Theme
To provide your website with an engaging user interface and make it attractive, we recommend that you choose a theme (website layout) to make it look more professional. This is especially important for visitors who will be visiting your site and navigating through your soon-to-be content-rich website/blog.
There are many free WordPress themes that you can use for your website to make it more mobile responsive and easily navigable. You can keep your website the same and use the default/generic template that you selected when you signed up. However, professional themes allow you to personalize your site and give it a more unique look. You can create a unique website design with themes/designs. They also allow you to add specific functionality.
A professionally designed theme will allow you to create a professional website that is more engaging, more user-friendly, more attractive, more professional, more experienced, and more profitable.
7. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
SEO refers to a set of practices that you use to optimize your website for search engines to index it and rank it appropriately. Your website will compete with other websites that have similar content once it is “crawled by search engines”.
Your website will appear higher on search engine result pages if it has a good design and quality content. You should do proper search engine optimization of your website for Google and Bing via keyword research and implementation to keep the audience clicking on your website. You can also link your social media pages to your website to improve its traffic instantly.
8. Publish Quality Content Regularly
Search engines value both content quality and freshness. This is why it is important to create a plan for publishing quality articles and blog posts on your website and any external sites linking to it. You must update your website as often as possible to ensure your site ranks highly in search engine results. This will encourage people to visit your site again and again.
9. Let Them Know About You
You can show your business’s core competencies and professional ethics on your website to engage more audiences. Create a section on your website to display the profiles and pictures of your team to increase the trust of the audience. You should also show the main aim of your business in good quality content and also use graphics to unleash the real value of your business.
10. Install Necessary Webmaster Tools
Install Google Analytics and Google Search Console to analyze site traffic and performance. The following information can be tracked with these tools:
- Visitors on daily, weekly, and monthly
- How many times each page has been viewed approximately
- Tracking the Bounce rate
- Average time spent by visitors
- Crawl errors
- Broken links
- Keywords that direct users to your website
- Backlinks to your website
- Web page download time
- Additional information to help you improve your SEO