Setting Up Your First Business Website: 14 Dos and Don’ts

Setting Up Your First Business Website: 14 Dos and Don’ts

While you can run your business using social media, having a website dedicated to it can make a difference in achieving success in the market. Your business website will serve as the hub of your online marketing activities. It’s where you can discuss your company and sell your products and services effectively.

Having a website for your business is also an opportunity to make good first impressions and show your target audience that you’re a legit company. Unfortunately, it’s not easy setting up your first business website.

If you don’t know where to get started, learn more about how digital marketing experts do it effectively to help you come up with a user-friendly and easy-to-navigate website.

If you’re planning to set up your first business website, here are some dos and don’ts to keep in mind to successfully come up with a perfect one:

1 – Do Keep Your Website Consistent

When setting up your first business website, consistency in layout, colours, navigation, and fonts is critical. It doesn’t only allow your audience to navigate your website easily, but they can also get the information they need to make a purchase.

Fortunately, there are many ways to add consistency to your website, and these include the following:

• Repeat Page Layouts – Visitors should know what to expect once they click through your website. Besides, it’s also beneficial to design the website where your audience expects it to be.
• Add Branding Elements – To ensure consistency throughout your website, it’s essential to add branding elements, like business logos, to every webpage. Using the same brand fonts and colours across every page may also be beneficial, particularly for links.

2 – Don’t Try To Do It Alone

Building a new website requires experience and skills you might not have. It’s also a time-consuming process, so you shouldn’t try to do it alone. Once you do so, you might only end up with an unattractive website and a waste of time and money.

The best solution for this is to hire professionals to handle the website creation process. There are several benefits of hiring experts to do the job for you. 

One of these is that you’ll have more time to focus on other essential business tasks you need to do before you launch your business. So, even if you think you can nail your first business website, it’s more beneficial to make the experts handle it.

3 – Do Have A Call-To-Action (CTA)

Every page on your website must entice your audience to do something. In short, you need to include a CTA on your website. Effective CTAs encourage your potential customers to take action, like sign up for services and buy your products.

Your CTA can be in the form of concise statements, links, and buttons. If possible, keep it clear and visible, so your audience doesn’t need to scroll to find the CTA.

4 – Don’t Settle With Just Any Website Address

If you want to make your first business website successful, don’t settle with any website address that pops into your mind. You have to choose wisely because it’ll speak volumes for your business.

When selecting your website address, ensure that it’s easy to remember and includes keywords you want to rank for in search engines. It’ll be much easier for your target audience to find your business online and drive more traffic to your website.

For example, your website address should include your restaurant name if you’re running a pizza business. It’s much better if you can include the word “pizza” so that people will know what you’re offering.

If you can’t come up with an excellent website address, try using name generators online to help you develop ideas. Just ensure that your website address is available before you register it.

5 – Do Make Your Website Mobile-Responsive

For your first business website to be effective, it should be mobile responsive. You have to remember that most people spend more hours browsing on their mobile phones.

If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, your users may abandon you in favour of your competitors. Also, a poor mobile user experience can affect your website’s search engine rankings, which may not help you reach your potential customers. Always keep mobile responsiveness in mind to provide a superb user experience to your visitors.

6 – Don’t Forget Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO helps improve your website ranking on search engines. It may also help you appear on the first page of the search engine page results (SERPs) when your potential customers look for the services or products you offer. That’s why it’s crucial to prioritise SEO when setting up your first business website.

Some of the ways to boost your SEO are as follows:

• Add keywords to your website’s header tags, meta descriptions, and title tags.
• Use the right keywords for your content.
• Build backlinks.
• Use social media platforms to share your content and maximise your website’s exposure.
• Create quality content relevant to your audience.

Aside from the above, it would help if you stayed updated on the latest techniques to improve your website traffic. This is because search engine algorithms constantly change.

7 – Do Keep Your Website Design Simple

Limit the use of visual elements that can distract your users while browsing your website. Keep your website design simple to make things easy to read and accessible.

When designing your website, you can simplify it in many ways. One of these is to lessen the number of your web pages. It provides fewer elements to distract users from your website’s essential parts. 

It also creates a more organised experience. However, before you get rid of any pages from your website, review everything first for you to determine which pages can be removed or merged.

8 – Don’t Opt For Low-Quality Web Host

Good web hosting is crucial so your business can offer quality service to your target audience. A reliable host also ensures that your security isn’t jeopardised due to the server’s vulnerabilities. So, don’t opt for a low-quality web host when setting up your first website.

When looking for a web host, there are many things you need to consider, and these are as follows:

• Positive customer reviews
• Reliable hardware
• Fair pricing
• 24/7 local support
• Scalability

Once you choose the right web host, it’ll help you boost your business growth and avoid major headaches in the long run.

9 – Do Consider Your Website’s Loading Time

Most people don’t have the patience to wait for a website to load. In many cases, they’ll abandon your website and look for those with better performance and faster loading times. So, consider your website’s loading time to provide your users with an excellent experience.

To improve the speed of your site’s loading time, you can do the following:

• Optimise And Compress Your Images

Images help improve your website’s visual appeal and increase your content quality. However, high-quality images may cause your loading time to slow down. As a solution, optimise and compress your images. It may include changing the file formats and reducing the file sizes. Once you do this, it’ll help your website load quickly.

• Remove Unnecessary Plugins

Every plugin isn’t made equal. Having many plugins on your website may cause unnecessary bloat, slowing it down. In addition, outdated plugins may pose a security threat and cause compatibility problems to hamper performance.

Particular plugins may also slow your website down more than others. Therefore, try to minimise your plugins by deleting and disabling plugins you don’t use. To determine which plugins reduce your page speed, consider testing them individually.

10 – Don’t Forget About Planning Your Website

Never plunge into building a website without planning. Identify your audience, establish critical points, your website’s purpose, and how you’ll monetise it. Then, create a sitemap that shows you the number of web pages you’ll make and how they link to each other. 

Decide which information is crucial and prioritise it.

Without identifying your business website’s goals and purpose, you won’t know if it’s a success or not. So, don’t forget about planning your website to stay on the right track.

11 – Do Add Social Media Integration

Social media plays a crucial role in a business website’s success. If you want to make the most out of various social media platforms, you should integrate them into your website.

Social media integration may help boost your website’s engagement rate and traffic. Adding social media buttons makes it easier for visitors to share your content on their social networks. Moreover, social media integration may help you track your content’s performance.

To add social media integration to your website, follow these:

• Make a social stream to showcase your website’s latest social media updates.
• Publish your blog posts automatically to your social media accounts so that your followers can quickly see them.
• Add social media buttons so that your users can easily share your content and follow your accounts. 

12 – Don’t Forget To Test Your Website

One way to ensure that your website is effective is to test it as often as possible. This will help determine possible problems that need tweaking before officially launching your website.

As you test your website, track how well elements perform so that you can make necessary changes. It would be best to use analytics to see how your audience interacts with your website. This information may help you decide what concept to remove, keep or change.

13 – Do Choose The Best Website Builder For Your Needs

When setting up your first business website, you’ll need a website builder. At present, there are countless website builders you can choose from. To pick the right one for you, it’s critical to evaluate your needs.

Remember that there’s a big difference between a landing page and a website handling eCommerce transactions. Knowing your needs and goals will help you choose the suitable website builder for your needs with ease.

You also need to keep your budget in mind. While some website builders are free, others come with annual payments and high processing fees. You can opt for a free website builder if you have a tight budget. 

However, it might not have all the features you need to create the first business website of your dreams.

14 – Don’t Take Content For Granted

Poorly written content may quickly cause visitors to leave your website. Never disregard the significance of a well-written headline because it can be powerful. It can also make a difference in your audience’s decision to leave your website and read your entire content.

You should also ensure that your content is relevant. It should contain updates and new trends related to your niche to keep your readers active and engaged.

If you want to deliver quality and killer content effectively, below are some of the tips to remember:

• Stay Away From Illegal Content

Typically, some website owners think it’s much easier to copy content online instead of creating their own. Although it’s time-saving, you should do your best to avoid this method.

The use of illegal content, such as copyrighted text and images, can harm your website. Search engines may even penalise you for copying content. So, ensure that your content is unique.

If you can’t write your content, outsource it to get original content. You can opt for stock photos or free clip art when it comes to images. If you want to use a copyrighted image, ask the owner’s permission first.

• Use Keywords

Keywords are essential for your content. But you have to choose wisely to get results, and to do this; you need to perform keyword research. You’ll know which keywords are most relevant to your business, making it easy for your website to show up on the first pages of SERPs.

If you’re confused about what keywords to use, you can take advantage of online keyword research tools. Once you find the right keywords, use them in your meta description, title tags, and throughout your website content to boost your search engine ranking.

Conclusion

Setting up your first business website isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. If you follow the dos and don’ts mentioned above, you can be sure that you’ll achieve success in no time. 

Never do it alone to get the best possible results and avoid any potential hassle involved in website creation. 

If possible, work with highly experienced and qualified digital marketing professionals who can help you throughout the process.