Building a Small Business Website

Interactive, Website Accessibility, Responsive
Compatibility, SEO Optimized, Visual Appeal

Steps for Setting Up A Business Website

Updated: July 8, 2023
By: RSH Web Editorial Staff

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Beginners Guide to Building the Perfect Business Website

Regardless of your niche, it is important to have a strong business website. This is essential for the success of your business as it can serve as a storefront and also help you tap into online business opportunities.

According to a recent report, only 64% of small businesses have websites. Despite the fact that having a website benefits small businesses. That’s difficult to hear, especially when more than 62 percent of consumers say that they won’t consider purchasing from a small business if they can’t find information about them online.

Designing A Business Website

When creating any website for any type of business, there is no one size fits all solution. You will need to consider your goals before you get started, so that you can implement design elements and tools to achieve your objectives.

For the best performance, you need to build your website with your business goals in mind. Following website design best practices for the structure, including making the website navigable, organized, and mobile responsive.

After launching the website, you must keep it up to date with valuable content. Here are tips to get started if you want to establish a business website.

Purchase a Good Domain Name

The domain name works as the website address. This is the entry point to your website. You should make it easy to remember and memorable. A perfect domain name will make a good impression for usability purposes, and it should also be ideal for search engine optimization (SEO). Avoid using slang or esoteric words. Keep it short will make it easier to remember and type correctly. A proper domain extension is also necessary to establish your website authority. Use a .com extension when you can instead of .net, .co, etc. You should also avoid numbers and hyphens on the domain name. These can make it hard to remember the address, and they are less elegant than word-only Domain.

Purchase Quality Web Hosting

Do not trust those online websites that say Best Hosting Reviews. 99% are nothing more than affiliate websites that make money if they refer you. And the only sites they list are the highest paying hosting companies, regardless if they're good or not.

Want a quick test to see how good a host really is?
Try these Google Searches
Godaddy Sucks
Bluehost Sucks
HostGator Sucks
InMotion Sucks

A good website host is a company that offers the services necessary to make your website visible on the Internet. Once you find the right host, you can connect your domain to that hosting provider.

Hosting Options

There are basically 4 different options for hosting your Website:

Shared Hosting

Just as the name implies, this involves one server simultaneously hosting multiple websites. In some cases, a single server may be hosting hundreds of different websites. This is the most cost-effective, but if your website is going to have larges amount of traffic or multiple intensive scripts you would want to opt for a larger plan

Virtual Private Server

This type of hosting runs its own copy of an operating system on separate partitions. You normally have superuser-level access to install almost any software that runs on that OS. It is functionally equivalent to a Dedicated Server. But being software defined. It can be setup and configured more easily. They cost less than a dedicated server. However, as virtual servers share the underlying physical hardware with other VPS's, performance may be lower, depending on the workload of any other executing virtual machines

Dedicated Servers

These are more expensive, but your website will perform better. This is a piece of hardware similar to a Hard Drive that you would have exclusive use of to host websites, email, data and applications. Dedicated Servers are a better option for large businesses that need scalability to handle large spikes in traffic. Better security policies can be implemented. Or to host multiple websites for their business. Generally speaking, the larger the business, the more bandwidth they will use and more data they will need to store.

Cloud Hosting

Utilizes the above environments, but the theory behind cloud hosting is to use multiple Servers to store the data and to share the bandwidth usages. If one Server should happen to fail, the other would keep the websites online. More of an advertising ploy than solving any real issues.

SSH

Keep the Design Simple

Your website design is a part of CRM - Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It should provide the resources your customers need to understand your products and find answers. At the core of your website, you should have software to track user activities to understand your target audience better.

Use short paragraphs and, where necessary, bullet points to make information easy to read. It is important to ensure mobile responsiveness, which is a key factor in the way Google ranks websites. When your website ranks well, it will appear on top of a search engine results page.

Use a Call to Action

To entice readers to take action, it is important to include a call to action on different pages. For example, placing a link to your social media platforms at the end of a blog with the text “Follow us on Facebook”, is likely to help gain more social media followers. Another option might be an eye-catching banner, which you can place at the top of the page. These increases brand awareness of the business. Alternatively, you can use an online banner maker to create a customized banner for your site and social media pages. After creating a banner that matches your brand, personalize it with color, text, font, and use a matching animation or video. It is not hard to find a banner template such as the ones at Adobe Website with many options to choose from.

Content Management Systems

A content management system (CMS) is a fancy term for a Website Builder. They help you create and manage your website. Instead of having to code by hand, you can use a website builder. One of the most poplar is WordPress. Find a CMS designed for your unique needs. It should be user-friendly, within your budget, and offer extensibility. Some popular options you can integrate into your website include WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. RSH Web offers more than 40 with our hosting plans

Online Privacy

Optimize Your Website for SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes it easier for customers to find your website when they perform a search on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or any of the hundreds of search engines available today. The stronger your SEO, the higher your Website's content will rank in search results. It can help you to show up on the first page of Google, which can result in large amounts of free traffic to your website.

Keyword research and implementation

One of the first things you will want to do is to do keyword research. Keyword research is the method of identifying the best keywords to target to help you generate organic traffic to your website

Fast loading Websites

Load speed can make or break a website. Loading time is not just a matter of preference. It has a huge impact on the success of the website. The longer a webpage takes to load, the more visitors are unhappy, and the bounce rate will increase.

Have an SSL Certificate

Regardless of the website you run, an SSL certificate is highly important. SSL Improves customer trust, popularity, maintain reputation, protecting data, deter hackers and in the end will help with revenue.

Optimizing Your Website for Mobile Use

With the growing numbers of people using mobile devices today to access the web, only a mobile-friendly website can promise to offer that experience. This has led Google to switch to mobile-first indexing, prioritizing mobile-optimized websites when ranking pages.

High Quality Backlinks

A few good, high quality backlinks can mean the difference between being found in search engine results. They can be that important. Quality backlinks are a key trust and authority factor used by search engines to value your website.

Use Webmaster Tools

To get your site's SEO report such as indexed pages, crawls, clicks, Malware, errors, and to know the site's performance in search engines you must use web-master tools. Google Analytics and Google Search Console (both preferably via Google Tag Manager), and Bing Webmaster Tools. These tools can be used to track the following types of information:

  • • Average time spent on website by your visitors
  • • Bounce rate. This is the percentage of users who come to your website and leave after having only viewed one page
  • • Daily, weekly, and monthly visitors to your website
  • • Broken links on your website
  • • Keywords that lead users to your website
  • • Backlinks to your website
  • • Number of views on each page of your website
  • • Crawling errors on your website
  • • Web page speed or downloading time

Have Positive Reviews

Using reviews for SEO will help to boost overall authority, reputation and traffic quality. As such, reviews can have a positive effect where SEO and rankings are concerned. And if a negative review does show up, make sure to answer it. This is one thing most web masters overlook.

Most review websites are fake
This looks like it also includes Trustpilot, RSH Web had well over 150 positive reviews. But when we would not sign up and pay a monthly fee. All our reviews but a few disappeared.

Conclusion

As you can see, creating a good business website is fairly straight forward if you know the steps to take. These guidelines give you the basic structure you can follow to get started with the project. Make your website a marketing tool. A good design will improve efficiency and help you connect with customers better.

We welcome your comments, questions, corrections and additional information relating to this article. Please be aware that off-topic comments will be deleted.
If you need specific help with your account, feel free to contact us anytime
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