4 Basic Steps to Building a Website

As a business owner, you're doing everything you can to better organize your company. You're working on getting more word-of-mouth reviews, improving your customer service and outsourcing different tasks. Your next thing to tackle is launching a website. Creating a website for your business is one of the smartest things you can do for your marketing strategy. This way, customers can reach you, learn more about your products and read up on what your brand is all about. But what does it take to build a website? Keep reading to find out.

1. Get a Domain Name

Before you do anything, you should first choose a domain name. For businesses that are already established, this will be an easier task. That's because you already have a name for your business, so it makes sense to use that for your domain name. For example, your business may be called Ms. Anne's Cleaning Company. Therefore, your domain name could be "msannescleaning.com". However, there isn't a rule that says your domain name has to match your business name. Choose whatever you want. But make sure it's short, sensible and easy to read.

2. Create a Business Email Address

After choosing your domain name, you can then move on to creating an email address that will be linked with your site. This is how your visitors will contact you on your site. By using a contact form, they'll be able to enter any problems, questions or concerns they have. Then, their inquiries will appear in your email inbox.

Having a business email is not only great for helping customers reach you directly from your website, but it can also gain trust and build credibility. A business email appears more professional and legit. It won't have the typical @gmail.com or @aol.com suffix. Instead, it'll have your business name in it. This can help remove any doubts people may have about the legitimacy of your business.

Plus, it isn't expensive to get a business email. In fact, it's pretty cheap and easy to get set up with Google's G Suite.

3. Choose a Hosting Company

The next thing you want to do after choosing your domain name and setting up a business email is to choose a web hosting company. A hosting company acts as a storage unit that houses your site on the web. Whenever someone enters your domain name in a web browser or clicks a link to your site, the browser will fetch your site content from your website host. This means that you want to choose a quality host. Otherwise, your site stands a higher chance of experiencing downtime. When this happens, no one can visit your site and it may show an error.

When choosing a hosting company, consider how many visitors you expect to attract to your site. As more people visit your site, the cost of your hosting will increase. In this case, you'd need to upgrade from basic to advanced hosting. There are many types of hosting. There's shared hosting, where you share a server with other websites. VPS hosting, is similar, except it provides a higher capacity to handle more visitors. Be sure to do some research and choose the type of hosting that's best for your website.

4. Pick a Content Management System

Picking the right content management system, or CMS, for your website will depend on your individual needs, skill level and features you desire, like Magento 2 Extensions. A CMS is what allows you to create, edit and publish content on your website. Some content management systems even allow you to easily build your website using drag-and-drop builders. This eliminates the need to do all the coding and design yourself. Other content management systems provide free hosting.

Building a website can be easy, depending on how you go about it. Just make sure you're following all the necessary steps.