How to Build a Great Business Website and Grow it Online

Whether you own a pet store, have a clothing brand, or want to sell your painting courses online, a neat and well-designed website for a successful business is no longer something you can delay building; it’s a necessity. 

The perfect website built especially for you and your purposes is what makes or breaks a business. 

Your audience or customers need a point of reference to learn more about your products/services. More so, a well-built website gives your brand a legitimate look and lets your audience know that they can put their trust in you and your business. 

It’s essential to take time and learn more about what makes a great website. 

Here are some key tips on how to start planning and building your brand new website for your business and how to grow it online successfully.  

Building a Business Website 

1. Understand the purpose of your website 

Your audience should clearly understand what your business does and how it can help them achieve their needs when they first visit your website.

Whether you want to give more general information about your business or build a direct platform for e-commerce and online shopping, you need to understand the main goal of your website so that the consumer can navigate their way through it and easily find what they’re looking for.

Think of it as making a first impression. You need to make it clear to your visitors what your services include and how you can help them achieve said goal by the time they’re navigating through your website. 

2. Choose a domain name and logo 

The next step is to choose a creative domain name and logo that will represent your brand to the best. 

There are services like domainQuick that help business owners develop creative domain names and design their website logo according to their needs. 

Your domain name is how everyone will know your business online, so it’s essential that you know what your brand represents and stands for. 

Some tips for choosing domain names:

• Make it memorable and creative
• Don’t use hard to pronounce or spell names
• Avoid using numbers or hyphens 
• Check if the names are available on social media
• Go with .com
• Don’t go overboard with words; shorter is always better

3. Choose a secure web host 

After deciding on your domain name, next, you need a ‘place’ that will host your website for you. These companies offer the technology and means required so that your website can be viewed on the internet.

Choosing a reliable and safe host is essential before you can launch your website. Ensure the company has good tech support if you need to contact them regarding issues or other website-related topics. 

You can choose from several different services, whether they’re shared web hosts and therefore less expensive, or dedicated hosts that only your website’s data is stored in. 

4. Outline the content of your website

Before moving on to how you will manage your content, you need to know what pages your website needs. In general, most websites have:

• Home page
• About us 
• Blogs to showcase your expertise
• Management or get to know the team
• Contact us 
• Products/Services 
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use
• Sitemap for SEO purposes

Whether you’re hiring an agency to handle the building of your website or doing it through a DIY content management system, you need to know the basic outline of your webpage to execute your vision properly.  

5. Determine what content management system you want

A content management system or CMS is a software program that lets you create, publish, and manage your website’s digital content. Through this, you can create new blog posts, upload videos or images, and add new pages. 

The great perk of having a CMS is that it doesn’t take the technical knowledge of a website developer to manage your site’s platform. 

Some of the most popular CMS software are WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Joomla!, and Drupal. 

You can research each CMS and what they offer and easily find the one that suits your website’s content style the best. 

6. Design your website layout to have an engaging and easy to navigate user interface

At the end of the day, what makes a visitor stick around in your website, is how easily they navigate the information you offer and how they engage. 

You want your website to leave a good impression on your audience. This is how you do that:

• Use easy-to-read fonts.
• Pay attention to graphics and design. Beautiful designs that grab the attention but, at the same time, aren’t over the top are the key. 
• Make sure the website is optimized for mobile visitors too
• Place strategic and obvious call-to-action (CTA) buttons.
• Avoid over-crowding a page with different information. Instead, use multiple tabs or pages for different types of content.
• Stay consistent with your brand and persona.
• Make sure your website is loading quickly.

Growing Your Business Online 

1. Produce and publish regular and high-quality content 

Design and content go hand in hand in engaging your website’s visitors. Without high-quality content, your audience won’t have a reason to stay on your website and, instead, will bounce to a competitor with better results. 

Whether it’s audio, video, or visual writing content, the content you create needs to be on-brand with your business and goals and provide your audience’s needs. 

Online content is very much so different than how we perceive content offline. 

Users have shorter attention spans and tend not to read a page word-by-word but rather skim it to get the gist of what you offer.

You need to grab your visitor’s attention, get to point quickly, and make them stay until they find/ get the answer to what they’re looking for. 

2. Optimize your website for search engines (SEO)

You have a website launched, ready to go, but no one is visiting it, and you have a hard time making your website seen among all the thousands of results. 

This is where search engine optimization or SEO comes into play. 

SEO is an art form, that when done correctly, will make your website rank higher on search engine web results, making it easier for a new audience to find your page. 

You can have experts consult you on your website’s SEO and use tools to help you along the way.  

3. Improve your website’s loading speed

People are impatient. They want to get the best results as fast as possible, so if you’re not delivering, they close your website and move on. This is called your website’s “bounce rate”. The lower it is, the better your performance. 

Make sure your website loads as fast as possible, so the waiting time for your visitors is reduced. According to a study, if a page’s loading time goes from 1s to 3s – the probability of bounce increases 32%. 

4. Analyze and make data-driven improvements 

If you don’t know what you’re doing wrong, you can’t make adjustments to fix the issue. It’s essential to test and analyze everything after it’s launched and published to see whether it works for you and your audience. 

Don’t stop improving your website as soon as you start to see good results. Your mindset should be “Great, but how can I make it even better?” and work towards that. 

There are great online tools such as Google Analytics or more that can help you see your data clearly and make the right adjustments for improvement.