In this article, we will talk about how small business to create their websites. Currently, there is a fact in the industry – there are almost all shoppers who are willing to make a study online before they make the purchases, but there are still half of businesses who do not have their own websites for their online store, and most are the small businesses. The main reason to this phenomenon is the efforts and costs of creating a self-owned website, which keeps them away from staying online.
Of course, there still other fractional factors to this issue in the past time, while creating a small business website is not as difficult and expensive as before. There are vast choices available outside waiting for being chosen, which are all easy and cost-effective. In the following post, we are to bring you a complete process of creating small business websites, whose steps are as following in general:
- Choose Your Domain Name
- Create Your Pages and Website Content
- Decide Your Logo
- Create Your Small Business Website
To create a professional website for small business, you need firstly decide the web hosting provider. Based on customers’ reviews and our experience, here we’d like to recommend 2 options, which are for different needs. Bluehost, one of the best web hosting provider, can offer you a free domain registration, free website builders, 1-click WordPress installation, business email and free ads credits, starting at $2.95/mo only here.
The other option is Weebly that is relatively more expensive than Bluehost and doesn’t include free domain or business email, but it’s easier-to-setup, so it is great for those beginners.
Step One: Choose & Register a Domain Name for Your Website
When you choose a web hosting plan and is going to sing up an account, the first thing is to get a domain name. It is also the first thing for you to start your business site. For example, when going with Bluehost web hosting plan and you decide the domain name as www.yoursmallbusinesswebsite.com, and then you need to check whether it is available on the internet or not! At Bluehost, you should enter the name into the following domain name search tool:
There will be two kinds of search results. One is that if your name with .com version is available, you can choose that name for your business website. Or if you have special favorite suffix, Bluehost can also offer you. You also can add the location at the domain name’s end, so as to increase your website’s visibility in search engine when people are searching locally.
The other is that the name isn’t available, and then Bluehost domain name search tool will offer your several different domain names which are slightly different from yours. You can choose to use one of them. Or you can just change the phrases or use another suffix to check again.
However, we do not recommend to change in terms of suffix only to make the name available! .Com is the most frequently used suffix now, so, it is very possible that when you are promoting your business website in .NET version, you will lose some customers who are search for .COM website.
3 Tips for Deciding a Business Website Domain Name
We have mentioned a possibility before that your domain name has been taken by others and if you just change the suffix, you may lose many customers. Therefore, the best solution for that should be to change the phrase. Here we conclude 4 tips for coming up with a business website domain name alternative:
- Domain name is of course very significant for search engine, such as Google. When it is possible, your small business website name should include the phrases that users or customers are most liable to use for seeking for your products, services. This is also an SEO practice from the very beginning!
- Domain name need to be easy-to-remember as well as pronounce. You need to make your domain name short and simple as possible, while you should avoid the punctuation. In shortly, you need to try your best to ensure the name can be easily found out when people heard it.
- Add your location can make your domain name unique. To add your location (city or area) is used when the others are al taken. If a customer enter the city or area you added to search for a product or service, your site could appear on the Google.
- Domain name generators are easy-to-use for a website domain name grasping. We have already collected the best blog and website domain name generators for you. You can freely choose one of them to get the best suitable one.
Register a Domain Name
After you decide your small business website domain name, we recommend Bluehost and Weebly for you to register it.
At Bluehost, the one option is to just purchase a domain name, which is separately sold at $19.99/yr. Or you can buy its special website hosting plan, coming with a free domain registration, free website builder, easy WordPress installation, business email and free ads credits. This plan starts at $2.95/mo instead of $7.99/mo originally.
At Weebly, you need to buy a domain name registration with its free website builder plan, or you can go with other higher plans, along with free domain and Google ads, which start from $8/mo.
Note: although you may take a long term to complete the whole building of your small business website, you still need to buy the domain name and register the name you generate before, in case it is used by others.
Step Two: Outline Your Small Business Website Pages & Content
It is often difficult to make sense the content you want to say and display on your small business website. And this step is also the first and biggest barrier to stop small businesses from building their own website.
However, as for business website, the webmasters do not need to say a lot. The best functional small business website should be clear and simple and feature minimal text for the product or service. Besides, the best small business website should only have one single “choice/option” on one page, and include “Contact Us” buttons and submission form.
In addition to that, your small business website can follow the standard website format, creating four essential pages! Following the list, you just need to consider the text, content and images you will include on each page and never worry about how to format them.
Homepage
On the page, your business name and business location should be included. Moreover, you need to describe your unique features in several lines, making you stand out from the various options that customers have.
Products & Services
The page should include the details of your products or services you can offer on the web site. Remember that when you are detailing the services or products on the page, it is better to use 5 sentences to describe each one you offer and provide the pricing of each one.
About Us
Here you can provide your business company background as well as list the organizational memberships of you company. If you do not want to make your customer testimonials link our on another separate page, then you can include them at About Us as well.
Contact Us
The page is to provide your contact information. So, Contact Us page should include your email, telephone number, address, as well as the open hours of your business website. What’s more, there should be your business social media account buttons like Facebook and LinkedIn. If it is applicable, you can embed the Google Maps of your business location and detailed lines to get here.
Actually, you’d better make your contact information including phone number, physical address, and related social media buttons prominently be featured on each other page of the small business website. Moreover, it is even better to make your contact information like your address and phone number both texts instead of images, which is good to your SEO efforts.
Tools to Make Better Mobile Websites
With the popularity of smartphone because of ease-of-use, more and more customers will search the products and service from smartphones rather than computers. It means there is a field that small businesses cannot miss, which is the mobile-friendly website.
Fortunately, many optimal website builders can create mobile-friendly website for you automatically, and of course, Weebly is one of them. Actually, it is the responsive themes which make the website detect the device you browsing from; then shift the size and content of your site automatically, to deliver you as well as your viewers the best possible experience.
According to our experience, we recommend you to make additional adjustments for the mobile-friendly website.
Generally, you need to remove all excessive content. Your call-to-action should be the focus of your mobile website – if it is getting customers to all the business, join your mail list, make an order online, or fill out a contact form.
CTA buttons are very useful to help you get the mobile viewers’ call to your business. Besides, the CAT buttons can automatically populate your business telephone number into mobile viewers’ dialpad, one they click the buttons form their smartphones.
In addition to that, your embedded Google Map widget is vital for viewers to browse on-the-go, to quickly perform navigation on your business site.
Step Three: Decide a Logo for Your Business
After finishing the second step, you can move to the nest with a premium website builder. However, we have to mention that whether you have created a logo for your Business?
The font, style , and style of the logo can affect your website design, which is for the consistent web site theme between the logo and the web pages.
It is ideal that you have already used a logo for your business offline, and you just need to use a digital file of the logo on your site. However, if there is no a well-designed logo, or you want to make some upgrades from the current one, then you need the following methods to make it.
3 Options to Design a Logo
- DIY: We know that numerous logo wizards are available outside and most of them claim that they are free, but it is not the really free because there is a fee for downloading the logo. Well, we also find out that Graphic Springs is not one of them, and it does not require that fee. There are a number of logo wizards out there that will allow you to create your own logo.
- Make Full Use of Fiverr.com: this is a website matching you with each kind of product providers that will do projects, containing logos, at $5 only. With that option, you can get the logo after 2 or 3 weeks. So, it depends on your budgets. Besides, Fiverr may not offer you’re the most special and creative logos for you, but you have a possibility of finding a good designer with the portfolio you favor. For this, Fiverr.com can be a good option for the fees you paid.
- Take Advantage of 99Designs.com: the website will run contests in which different designers will compete for the log as well as other designs. To get the most creative and impressive logo, 99Designs.com could be the best option. It also means this option is the most expensive one among 3 the 3 options, and the pricing of it will depend on the number of designers and their quality you require in the competition. Generally, it ranges from $299 to $799.
Step Four: Put Your Small Business Website Project into Action
Now, you have the small business content and pages’ outline as well as the best business outline logos, you can start to build your small business website. Here we offer you 3 ways:
- DIY – design your small business website by using one of reliable online tools that is similar to those graphics editors, such as PowerPoint. It should come with ready-to-go templates and easy-to-use editor, without any programming required. So, it allows you to pick up a template and then use the simple editor to drag and drop the necessary elements.
Here we think Weebly is one of the best options, which can meet those needs. Even better, Weebly comes with expert customer support.
- Build a WordPress site with Bluehost – Actually, building WordPress site is a DIY option as well, but comparing with Weebly, it is a little more advanced. Although it does not need you to know anything about programming, it still needs you to learn more about it so as to get WordPress publishing system ready.
Fortunately, to build a good WordPress website is cheaper and it can feature more advanced integrations and tools, when comparing with Weebly. Here we have a great cheap WordPress web hosting provider, Bluehost. As we said before, it will offer you easy WordPress installation, free website builder, free domain name registration, and great customer support.
- Employ a Professional – if you do not want to spend time in website building but you still need one for your small business, you can just need to hand over the website line and your logo to a reliable freelancer. However, even though you choose the 3rd option, you still need to check and ensure that the freelancer uses a CMS or web builder for your site, like WordPress. It is because when it is done, you still can easily login the site and make your edits.
To make the process clearer to understand, we are going to show your more details about the 3 options above.
Option One: Use Weebly
With time going by, many website builders, especially those optimal ones have made some improvements, which make them more easy-to-use. Generally, with the best website builders, you can easily create professional small business websites with little or no design or coding experience. Weebly is just one of the best!
With Weebly, you can create the small business website very easy! Start from picking up a favorite template, and customize the template by adding the pages you outlined before, images of your products and service, text of website description and products details, pricing, and other content.
The editing on Weebly site builder is very easy and intuitive. You can easily grasp the editor, if you have ever used PowerPoint or Word. If you need to add elements, Weebly site builder comes with drag-and-drop editor, which allows you to drag elements from its sidebar; drag the corner to adjust sizes; and double click text box to edit or change the text.
Weebly is feature-rich, allowing you to add some interactive features on your site. It offer you the click-to-add options for web forms, Google Maps, Vimeo/YouTube embeds, etc. With it on your site, your customers and viewers will be liable to spend more time here and share your small business website.
Option Two: Build the WordPress Website with Bluehost
If you need more advance but less-expensive website, than Weebly, then WordPress will be a good alternative.
It looks like contradictory, but there is indeed a fact that WordPress is a more feature-rich as well as more economical option. Well, this option should go with Bluehost! Now, Bluehost will offer our readers an exclusive WordPress web hosting deal, which starts at $2.95/mo.
For WordPress, there are numerous plugins developed for adding additional functionality on the platform. WordPress is also great in managing a great number of users and pages on the site. Besides, you can also have redundant options to add special features, such as scalable tables, unbranded video player, calendars, mortgage calculators, and more.
Start with WordPress
Although WordPress does not quire your much programming knowledge, you still need to learn its backend menu well. Different from Weebly in editing way, WordPress offers more traditional editing menu.
About how to start the site with Bluehost, we have concluded the process in how to start a blog. To build a small business with Bluehost is very similar to stating a blog with Bluehost. Following our guide to build your WordPress site, you can possibly finish the creation in one hour.
Option Three: Employ a Professional
this option is for those who need to focus on their business. First of all, to build a simple small business website, you just need to employ an expert to design your site with your site outline and logo, as well as an easy-to-use web builder like Wix and Weebly. And you can get many great freelancers online such as UpWork, they can design and create the the Weebly web site for about $10 to $20/hr.
As a much easier and less expensive website creating option, it also allows you to make necessary changes after the expert completed. To make it, you just need to log in the account and make full use of Weebly simple editing features.
Conclusion
In short, Bluehost is really a less-expensive as well as very versatile way for you to build your small business website. Starting at $2.95/mo only, you can receive a lot, including a domain, business email, professional WordPress web site, and expert support.
Or, for a simpler and easier way, Weebly is of course the first option. Besides free plan, Weebly starts at $8/mo, offering you free domain, Google ads credits, easy editor, and other ecommerce features. Responsive support is also available.
Sieve your needs and then choose one best suitable way to dive into the small website building now.