If you are a small business owner, it goes without saying that you must have a business website. These days, many web-savvy customers tend to check a company’s website before making a purchase decision, for driving directions, store hours, or even to email with a query. If you don’t have a website, you are definitely missing out on a lot of customers, which is not the best thing to do in today’s economy.
When you set out to make your business website, you have to be very careful who you trust. I’m pretty sure you get a lot of emails every day (hopefully landing in your spam folder) about companies that will make you a website for thousands of dollars or submit your site to search engines. These offers may seem good, but they are not. Most of these bogus companies will do work that is barely worth a few hundred dollars, and things like search engine submissions are nothing more than scams.
So, when you start building your website, make sure that you contact any web designer or search engine optimization specialist yourself.
Moving on, the first thing to use when creating your own website is your own domain name. It will cost you around $8-10/year for a .com domain name if you do a new registration. If you want to buy a pre-registered domain name, expect the price to be much higher. Whenever possible, get a domain name that reflects your brand (SamAutoWorks.com, for example) or your chosen industry (for example, AutoMechanic.com). Do not choose abbreviations, hyphens, or numbers in your domain name. Choose a registrar like GoDaddy for your domain.
Next, choose a web hosting provider. This is the service that will host your website. I assume you want to host only one website. In such a case, you can easily get hosting from a top host like HostGator or DreamHost for $5/mo. You can lower the price even further by paying in advance for 6 to 24 months.
Once you have the host, you’ll need to start building your website. This is the hard part. There are a number of options at your disposal here, depending on your level of computer skills. You can use an HTML template, have a WordPress business blog style template, or even design one yourself using software like Dreamweaver. Or you can hire a web designer to do it all for you. Depending on the complexity of your site (most small business websites are quite small), it will cost you anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars to hire a professional designer. Discussing how to make your own website is unfortunately beyond the scope of this article.
Your website will allow potential customers to take a look at your business before they actually make a transaction. Make sure it’s information-rich, along with strong visual appeal to convey the message of trust. An ugly and poorly created website will hurt your business interests more than any website.
