Are you tearing your hair out trying to get your website up and running? Trying to juggle your time between your business and building your website?
It takes time when designing a website from scratch. There are crucial elements you can’t overlook when creating your own website. It makes sense to have a look at the seven key areas needed to create a successful website.
This blog post will give you a good overview of this process and suggest easier options for you.
1: Determine Your Website Goals
Decide what you want your website to do. Many small businesses use their website to find people who have the problem your product or service solves. Then show them how you can help and guide them to trying or buying your solution.
But others fall short of this goal and decide to just build a digital brochure highlighting their business and add a way to contact them.
We believe that a website should be able to inform, engage and sell the visitor.
2: Identify Your Perfect Customer
Who is your perfect customer? It is not everyone who could enjoy your services. You do need to start looking at this by thinking about who can you reach that is happy to pay you to help them?
Some things to pinpoint your ideal customer would be age, gender, location, income, how bad they want your help, and delivering what you promise.
3: Define Your Unique Selling Proposition
You have competitors. Sometimes a lot of competitors. Start looking at what and how you are different from the rest. And ask yourself, do these differences benefit your ideal customer?
This is an opportunity to tell your story in a way that resonates with your ideal customer and gets them to believe you can help them.
Points of difference can be as simple as:
• Business with a smile
• We deliver on time
• We stand by our work
The basic rule is “Is there something you can do better than the competition?” If so, let your customers know. Showing them this is important.
4: Secure a Domain Name (and Hosting)
The domain name is the name you type in the address bar to get to a website. Most businesses use their business name as their domain name. Because it identifies them. But sometimes the business name doesn’t tell the visitor what you do, so they don’t know what’s in it for them.
For example, an online shoe store owned by Steptoe & Sons. This business name refers to the business owners, not what they can do for you. Steptoes Shoes is better. The domain name www.steptoeshoes.com may get traction with customers.
Not every domain name is equal. Spend your time working on this and don’t be afraid to ask your potential customers what they think of your domain name ideas.
And getting hosting becomes a crash course in a lot of technobabble to even understand how to set up a skeleton for your website.
5: Choose a Website Builder
There are many free website builders available, and some come with free hosting as well. That is a tempting option but these have domain names like steptoeshoes.freecheapwebsites.net. This doesn’t do much for your public image and business reputation.
The same applies to email addresses. steptoeshoes@myispdomainname.net is not very credible. But sam.steptoe@steptoe shoes.com is.
Free web design tools attached to free hosting services can have limited flexibility and are not always the best option for business websites.
ModX, BuilderAll, and WordPress are tried and true website builders that can be hosted on free or paid domains.
Most web hosts hosting these builders can link your domain name to the site. But they all have a learning curve and varying degrees of complexity. They can be unnerving for first-time web builders.
6: Creating Design Elements
The look and feel of your website are important.
Your visitor makes a judgment on your business within a few short seconds of landing on your website. Design, color, images, and layout are important considerations to think about. This creates the initial impression of your website and helps the visitor know what to expect from your site.
Doing all this on your own is a daunting exercise for most new website creators.
7: Writing Your Important Website Pages
Before your website can help your business, your web pages need to be discovered by people. The three options for this are:
1. Realworld promotion
2. Paid online advertising
3. Search engines
All three options need strong writing skills and a good understanding of how to relax a visitor and persuade them to get your offer. Realworld promotion and paid advertising cost money. Hoping people can find you on search engines like Bing and Google is difficult and takes time.
Designing a Website from Scratch?
Websites take time to build. And creating a website for your business is important. What you say on your site and how you say it will influence both the search engines and your website visitors. It is important to create a positive influence for both.
The seven steps in this blog post will point you in the right direction to start designing a website from scratch.
And you can find online tutorials that will take you through the process step by step. It will take time. For most people, this time could be better utilized in their business. And at the end of it, you will have learned a lot and gained some skills in web design and site-building.
Another option is to find “cheap” freelancer sites where providers will make a website for a small business. It is difficult to determine the reliability of these providers and the quality of their work. Many of these providers use “cookie-cutter” solutions with a one size fitting all mentality.
Or you can make use of one of the professional web design companies you can find online.
But if you want to gain some expert help, Sunlight Media LLC can work with you to get visitors to your website, convert them to buyers, and grow your business.
Why Design a Website from scratch?
Small business people do think about how designing a website from scratch can help them. Given enough time and skill, it is definitely doable. And it is fun to do.
But is this what you should be spending your time and energy on?
Feel free to look through our other technology posts for more insights, tips, and tricks you can use.
