There are a few critical things that you should be prepared before building a website. It doesn’t matter if you are going to do it yourself or you will have someone do it for you. Don’t expect that every website developer or designer knows what he or she should know. Sometimes they know it but they won’t do it because they know that you don’t know it. Furthermore, when it comes to website development, there are a whole lot more than just knowing how to create a website technically. I will cover more on the topic of “what a web design service firm should know” later on..on another article or video.
Get a website address or domain name. The best place that I know of is Godaddy.com. The cost is around $10 per year. Now the domain name is very important. It gotta be short, easy to remember, friendly to search engine keyword(s), etc. I will talk more about this in the next article on the topic of choosing the right domain name for your business. If it’s possible, it has some service keyword(s) to what you are doing. For example, if you are providing digital marketing services or solutions, then having a domain name like www.digitalmarketingsolutions.com would be great. If it’s possible, it reflects your business name like Microsoft is www.microsoft.com. The chance is that the domain you wanted is most likely has been purchased by someone or some firm. You will have to settle for the best that is available to you.
Develop a strategy to be found when people searched for your product(s) or service(s). This is one area that most people didn’t think much because they didn’t know much about it. Well, they will when they found out that their websites are just “dead fishes in the water”. For most businesses, the reason to have a website in the first place is to promote their business. And the biggest place to promote your business is through search engines such as Google, Bing or others. This means that if you operate a dog training service and people went on Google and searched for “dog training service near me” as an example and they didn’t find you. You failed. I will talk more about how you can optimize your website to be found on search engines in the next article. Please keep in mind that each article I wrote, it has to be kept under 700 words if possible because each of these articles will be made into a video and the video has to be less than 5 minutes.
Develop a strategy to be found when people searched for your product(s) or service(s). This is one area that most people didn’t think much because they didn’t know much about it. Well, they will when they found out that their websites are just “dead fishes in the water”. For most businesses, the reason to have a website in the first place is to promote their business. And the biggest place to promote your business is through search engines such as Google, Bing or others. This means that if you operate a dog training service and people went on Google and searched for “dog training service near me” as an example and they didn’t find you. You failed. I will talk more about how you can optimize your website to be found on search engines in the next article. Please keep in mind that each article I wrote, it has to be kept under 700 words if possible because each of these articles will be made into a video and the video has to be less than 5 minutes.
Create a content development strategy for your website. Meaning, if you are offering “dog training service”, then you want a website to talk about it. Talk about it here means that the keywords “dog training service” have to be weaved into the contents of your website both on texts and photos. So make sure that these keywords not only showed up on the title of the page but also through the pages. It sounds easy but when it comes to doing it; it’s not as easy as it sounds. Most people developed the contents first and then worry about the ability to be found later. This is putting the cart before the horse.
Define long-term and short-term goals for your site. Do you have a plan to add more products or services to it later on? Will the current design accommodate future expansion? The list can do on and on.
Define the functionalities of your website? What can people do when they get to your site? What type of users and what role they play? For example, if you are planning on creating a real estate listing website. There could be the site owner, the listing agents, the preferred lenders, the agent that represented the buyer and the agent that represented the seller. What can each of these people do when they get to your website? You have clearly defined the role of each, what each can see and what each can not see, what each can do and each can not do when they do it, how the do it. Man! The list can go on and on. But you can’t design the website and expect it to function as you wanted until you have all of these well defined.
Set your budget and timeline. It’s best to be upfront with your web design vendor about your budget and timeline. Most good web design firms or vendors will tell you whether or not they can take on your project based on your time and money. If you don’t, they will assume that they can ask for more later on. And if you don’t open your wallet for what they are asking, then either they will do a sloppy job on it or worse; they walked away. You called your attorney and he said it’s not worth it because his legal fee is much more than what you will be able to cover.
I hope that this article or video has helped you somewhat in answering the “How to get prepared for building a small business website?” question. I will be covering the following questions on my next articles or videos.
- What a small or start-up business website should include?
- How to create a website for your small or just started-up business DIYS?
- Why choosing the right domain name is very critical to your SEO success?
- Good design vs. Good SEO - which one is more important?
- What Google used to rank your website?
- Promising your client on a certain search engine ranking is a straight out lie! Why?