Since the mid-1990s, having a business presence online has been one of the best ways to increase revenue and popularity. This approach makes sense. Businesses no longer need to rely solely on a customer base made up of locals and occasional tourists. They can now reach and appeal to a global audience. They can market and sell their products or services worldwide! However, with a global audience comes global competition. Often, business owners ask themselves, “How can I build a website for my company?” They may believe it is nearly impossible. As a result, businesses that take the first step into the online world often find themselves surrounded by several – if not hundreds – of competitors. These competitors are already scooping up their potential customers!
Thankfully, there are ways to build a website that represents a business well and competes in the virtual market. However, building a website isn’t as simple as using a nice template. The process can be long and challenging. It involves complex coding, design choices, marketing strategies, and ongoing maintenance. While it may be tough, it’s rewarding and manageable with the right help.
Taking the “DIY” Route vs. Hiring Professionals
At every step, you’ll face a decision: Hire a professional or handle it yourself? Thankfully, there are ways to build a website for your company that represents a business well and competes in the virtual market. However, building a website isn’t as simple as using a nice template. The process can be long and challenging. It involves complex coding, design choices, marketing strategies, and ongoing maintenance. While it may be tough, it’s rewarding and manageable with the right help. As a result, you can certainly get quality, but it’s going to come at a price.
You can always learn about some areas yourself, and you might be able to do a good job too. However, this takes time, practice, and, more importantly, experience. If you have no plans to build more websites in the future, it may be smart to hire a professional.
The Development Process
Although there are many components to a good website, the foundation comes in the form of code. Code comes in many languages, each serving a different purpose. HTML and CSS create the structure and appearance of a page. JavaScript and jQuery handle client-side scripts like animations. PHP and MySQL manage communication between the website and a database. Developers also use other languages, such as Python, Ruby, and AJAX. However, the ones mentioned are the most basic and common. If you’re building an e-commerce website, it will likely use a combination of these!
The Design Process
While development may be the foundation – and even the frame – of the “house,” design is just about everything else. Design, however, is more than just looking pretty: It’s the art of catching the eye of your visitor, getting them to stay, and above all, ensuring that they can easily navigate the website without hassle or confusion. These things are significant, especially considering that users will leave a website the moment they become confused, lost, or frustrated.
Company Website Basics
Before you can begin designing your website, you will need to first register a domain, if you haven’t already done so. Web design covers a broad topic that could fill several long books, but focusing on some basics will ensure great results.
- Could you keep it simple? Most visitors don’t want to be greeted by a website with hundreds of different navigational options, several different uncoordinated colors, and haphazardly-placed images. Keep your design, images, and layouts simple and easy to navigate; it goes a long way!
- Keep the essentials at the top. The “essentials” will vary between websites, but they usually include the website’s header, the navigation bar, and the shopping cart. Keep these elements at the top and ensure they remain consistent across pages.
- Make sure everything is accessible. In other words, don’t “hide” things: Make sure everything the user would ever need is only a few clicks away.
- Keep the First Law of Usability in Mind: “Don’t Make Me Think!” Usability expert Stephen Krug first wrote this law in his book by the same name. Whenever you face a design decision, ask yourself, “will including this make it so that my visitors need to ‘think’ to get around it?” If the answer is “yes,” consider a simpler alternative.
If you complete the previous two steps successfully, your website is likely built and ready to launch! But once you’re online, how will anyone notice you? Well, this is the other half of the battle: Marketing. This topic covers a lot, but you can condense it into a few major sections, like a design.
Marketing and Promotion
- Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization: Often abbreviated simply as SEM and SEO, both are incredibly effective ways of becoming visible online. Whenever someone wants to find something online, they almost always submit their query to a search engine. As a result, marketing through search engines through paid listings is often a brilliant decision.
- SEO, however, is where things get slightly more complicated. Search engines such as Google organically rank websites based on numerous factors, such as your content’s keyword density, the number of links from other websites, and more. Since this subject is rather broad, it’s best to pick up a few reputable books on the subject. Although it may be complicated, you can drive a lot of traffic at no cost when you execute it correctly!
- Paid Advertising: “Renting” parts of other websites so that you can host advertisements leading back to your website is very effective but is also expensive. Thankfully, many advertising agencies can help you with this.
- Social Media: Social platforms like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are great for promoting your business and driving traffic to your website. To succeed, you need to create relevant and engaging content. This content often brings targeted traffic back to your site.
There’s a lot more to online marketing, but those three categories are the “big three.” However, bear in mind that the aforementioned are only brief descriptions: The actual subjects themselves are extensive and often interconnect. As a result, it’s recommended that you hire a professional to perform this task for you.
Maintenance for your Company Website
At this point, your website is completely built, launched, and being marketed in some way. The job, however, doesn’t stop here! You need to look after, maintain, and regularly update a great website. Thankfully, many tools exist that can help you keep track of numerous statistics, such as your website’s traffic. There are also other tools for other things, such as keeping track of marketing and advertising campaigns. Although there are many tools around, some of the best is Google’s free webmaster tools.
One of the best ways to keep your website updated is to maintain a regularly-updated blog with content relating to your company’s products. Doing so will not only help you keep things up-to-date but will also help drive traffic, establish yourself as an authority in the field, and even increase your rank in search engines if people link to it!
Intimidated Yet?
If you are, that’s perfectly alright: Setting up a website is more complicated than most would think! And to make things even worse, all of this was only the tip of the iceberg. However, don’t let it scare you off: We have been using HostOtter.com for about 10 years now and would definitely recommend using them. HostOtter.com can aid you build a website for your company. If you hire the right people and have a good product standing behind you, you’ll find that your website will be less of a maintenance hassle and more of a smart – and lucrative – investment.
Remember that investing in your website is investing in your business: If you invest wisely, you’re going to get some incredible returns!