Building a Website for Small Business Instantly: 5 Most Important Steps You Must Do

Building a website for your blog or business but not knowing where to start? This is just right for you. In recent years, it’s getting much easier and easier to make a website. With the support of 2021’s technologies and website builder platforms, it only takes a few hours to complete a nice, professional-looking website. So why waiting any longer, it’s time to create a website just for you. 

With building a website, you’ll want to make sure it’s fully functional while still looking on point. So the first step to do is choosing your web building platform, then get a domain and start setting up everything. A well-designed website will give you a great kickstart and would be absolutely useful for your business or personal branding in the long run. But first, what do you need for building a website?

What you need for building a website

Since in 2021, everyone could have the ability to establish a website, whether you’re a freelancer, small business owner, or just want a space to share your writing. To begin with, you’ll need to do these things: choosing a website platform, a domain, web hosting (if you choose a website builder then you can skip this). Next is setting up your website (this takes quite a while). Last but not least is creating content and a little bit of motivation. These will ensure you have a website that works like a charm. Although there are some disadvantages in comparison with building a site from scratch, this still benefits small business owners in so many aspects.

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Normally, you will need to have deep knowledge in coding and website design skills to make it all happen. However, now it’s so much simpler. You don’t need to learn coding, website design, or even just with a little website development skill is more than just enough. Within just 1-2 hours, you’ll be able to build a great website on your own.

Let’s get started with making a website: 5 steps only

Step 1: Selecting a website building platform. 

No matter what your purpose for building a website is, you’ll have to start by choosing a platform first. For beginners, we highly recommend choosing a website builder with a drag and drop interface. This way you won’t have to actually do any coding and it’s much simpler to work with. Although some might say that it’s not working well in SEO, we find that many platforms like Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly are doing really well in improving themself. 

If you are a little bit more advanced, then WordPress would be a great and powerful choice. Even if it’s not as simple and easy to work with as other website builders, WordPress is pretty user-friendly, won’t cost much, and just perfect to start with. 

Step 2: Website hosting and domain. 

We’re still getting on the basic first, so the most important part is getting a domain name and choosing a website hosting. 

The domain is your website address, and normally people will try to align their domain name with their brand name. It's a part of your branding, so you should try to keep it simple and easy to remember.

Website hosting is the place where all your files and information are kept. Not only it affects how many images and content you could put on your site, but it’ll also determine your site loading speed as well. If you’re working on a website builder for making a website, keep your eyes on some good monthly plans. 

Typically, it will cost you a few bucks a month, and a little extra upgrade will satisfy you and your users so much more. 

Step 3: Setting up your website. 

At this stage, it’s either signing up to a website builder or begin installing a website platform. No matter what you choose, within a click, you’re ready to go. Once you’ve had your account, most website builders have their AI tech to automatically develop a website for you. Or if you want to manually do it, just choose a template and get started. Next, let’s decide your site map, choosing what you want on your webpage, and let’s get rolling.

After knowing what you want on your site, it’s time to find templates that suit your brand and start customizing it. Most website builders have drag and drop editing, so working on it will be really simple. 

Another thing you should do is adding functional buttons to your site. Either you lead users to your store, creating conversion or click through your social media. 

Step 4: Adding contents. 

When you’ve come to this step, well done. You’ve gone 80% of the whole process. Adding content will bring your website to life and help you attract more and more users. Without blog posts, it’ll be hard to crawl up in SEO ranks. When first creating content for your site, you’ll need to determine what are your main subjects. Stick to all the customers' questions and try to solve them as much as possible. Be unique and be useful, you’ll get a lot more clicks and conversions.

Step 5: Testing and publishing your website.

When building a website or any form of content, it’s more important to publish rather than try to hold on to perfection for so long. Try to test if everything is well functioning and allow other people to check your site out for you as well. Then as long as you have content, publish it. You can always come back and fix some small faults at any time, it’s your website. Yet the sooner you publish your blog, the better chance you have with SEO ranks.

At this point, you’re pretty much done with building a website and ready to tell the whole world about it. See, learning how to make a website is much simpler than it used to be. 

How to make a website seems much more professional

We might not believe in love at first sight, but the first impression, whenever you click on a web page, is real. It determines the whole mood and feeling when users scroll through your site. Remember this, you only have under 10 seconds to impress your users, what would you do? Here are some of our tips that you could take advantage of when building a website. 

Mobile-friendly design: 

As you can see, nowadays we use our mobile phone much more than a desktop. And the traffic from mobile users has absolutely overtaken the market. Seeing that, you’d want to develop your site in a way that could be responsive to mobile and tablet platforms. Make your users feel comfortable hanging around your site by adapting it on multiple platforms. 

Load faster! 

Besides a professional look, your site must function professionally as well. This means it must load quickly and fully as soon as possible. Not only load time could affect your user's satisfaction, but it also leads to a higher bounce rate and gives your site a much lower ranking. To minimize your loading time, you can optimize your images, buttons, and interaction between pages. 

Choose your design: 

We know that the temptation to have a custom-made website design is huge. However, do you actually need it to achieve a professional look? The answer is no. Using a design template doesn’t mean you can’t customize it to your liking and need. Save your budget by using a template that works well on your site, and that’s more than just enough to impress your customers. Remember to keep your color, fonts, and mood align with your brand identity to avoid any confusion. 

Video for engagement: 

Short-form video is the king to boost your site engagement and conversion. It’s the latest trend and won’t be out of business for quite a while. Instead of making your users running through a block of text, let them see it all in a video. So why not hopping on such a high conversion, high engaging tool when building a website? 

One small trick, keep your video less than a minute and keep guiding your users to watch more, they’ll stay on your site much longer. 

Simplicity is key: 

Whenever it comes to design, the simpler the better. As long as you keep it simple to use, simple to understand, and elegant, you’re sure to have a professional-looking site. Your website design should always be clean, well organized, and have strong guidance so that users know exactly what to do and where to go. 

You should also concentrate on creating a smooth, clutter-free experience for your users, too. At the end of the day, we all crave conversion, clicks, subscriptions, why not keep it minimal with great function? 

Clear contact information:

Even though it’s a small detail, the impact it creates is powerful. As a user, we always want to know how we could contact the brand/ the owner. It gives a feeling of trust and safety since internet scams are getting more and more sophisticated. Give your customers all your contact information, from physical address, email, hotline, everything. Let them know you’ll be ready to support them if anything wrong happens. And just by that, you can get yourself some long-term customers or clients. 

Don’t forget that navigation bar: 

Give your customers a helping hand anytime they need it by providing a navigation bar. This allows them to go through pages with ease, searching for products that they want and more. Keep your navigation bar clear and well organized, your customers will thank you for that. 

High-quality images: 

We normally would advise people to stay away from soulless stock photos. However, in some cases when you can’t have a good photo, use stocks to make your site look neat. 

Be careful with using stock photos, you don’t want to end up using the same one as your rivals. Make sure that it’s clear, provides enough information, and is relevant to your business. 

Easy-to-read content: 

Well, let’s be honest about online content. Most people won’t read, they scan for pieces of content that they want to see. Therefore, you’d want to write blogs that are easy to read. Don’t forget to use headlines, break your text into smaller paragraphs and use more photos. 

And let’s not forget about text versus background contrast. Although back and white is the most iconic setup, you can still use other colors as long as they’re easy to read. 

Font size matters, too. Your site is not a 5000-word thesis report, don’t give it an 11-pixel size. Scale-up and you’ll see why. 

CTA button: 

Around the internet, you can see so many people telling you to put many CTA buttons on your webpage. But with us, one is enough when building a website. Make up your mind on what you want your user to do. Do you want them to sign up for emails, or buy products from you? From that, write a good CTA and allow it to do its work. Your website will look much more professional immediately. 

Give them a break:

Having great engaging content is more than just perfect, but you’ll need to have some breaks, too. Don’t be afraid of “white space” since you can always use pictures or simple graphics here. Just give your user a little eye break from so much fascinating information, they’ll appreciate it a lot. 

Building a website has now become a much easier task and brings out many merits. Using this step-by-step guide is a great way for you to start making a website. Give yourself some time to go through all of your tips and guidance, you’re sure to establish a site that you could be proud of. If you want to know more about building a website, keep following us! We have plenty of more content to show you.