Important Steps To Building Your First Small Business Website - Pt.1

A website is a must for all businesses – small or large, and anybody selling products or services. In spite of your other marketing methods, enabling likely customers to either find you through Google or learn more about your business after they’ve viewed your other marketing materials is vital to getting new customers.

If you’re selling online services or products, having a website is apparent. But even if you don’t sell anything directly on the internet, a website can serve as an extension of your business card, with information about you and your business. Most essential, your website ought to explain your background, knowledge, and other qualifications to give you authority and give potential clients more confidence when deciding on someone to choose.

1. Decide the Purpose for Your Website
What is your website is going to do for you?
Knowing what you plan on doing with your website is a vital first step for the reason that it will show you on how to develop as you move forward. Remember, it’s not a stationary thing and even if you begin without online sales, for example, it’ll be possible to add that later.

2. Choose Your Web Content Management Software
Dependant on what you want to do with your website, you have rather a few options in software. A number of them are even open source and offer various add-ons. You would be taken aback at how many websites you visit use one of these options.
E-Commerce

If your main focal point is e-commerce, you should choose software which is purposely made for e-commerce. However, if e-commerce is only a small part of your website’s point, you can get more popular content management software such as Joomla! and WordPress.
For instances of some e-commerce options, visit the following solutions:
VirtueMart
Magento
osCommerce
OpenCart

3. Decide on a Web Host
Once you have your software, you’ll need to choose a host, the remote place where your website and software will be held and made available online to your visitors.

Your choice of host depends in part on the software you choose but also on the speed and number of hits you expect to get on your website. With some host companies, you can start off with cheaper but less powerful shared hosting and, if needed, you can step up to much faster and more powerful dedicated hosting. This is something you should definitely think about when searching for a host, even if you start with the least costly alternative.