Your One-Stop Guide to Building a Business Website

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If there’s one truism in the modern world of commerce, it’s that businesses need websites. Only underscored by the pandemic, this fact means that you’re competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of competitors for your share of the online market – and our website is a key differentiator in that battle. Here, you’ll learn not only how to build a great website – but how to maintain it so that it’s always impressing your visitors and drawing in more traffic over time.

Appearance

Your website’s appearance needs to reflect the kind of company you’re promoting. If you’re a tech company, your website needs to be slick and seamless – but also minimalist and cool. If you’re selling flowers or beauty products, you want your visitors to feel that you have aesthetic sensibilities. Such considerations will form the backbone of your website and will be your north star when you’re planning how your site will one day look.

Layout

The other key consideration before you actually begin to build your website is how it’ll be laid out for visitors to navigate and explore. As a general rule, it’s considered crucial that you direct visitors as quickly as possible to your sales pages, with a call to action on each page to show them where they can find what they’re looking for. Sales and discount banners tend to work well, too, helping direct customers to the places they want to go on your website.

Building

You’ll always have two options when it comes to actually building your website. You can either go it alone by hiring a single web designer and providing them with a brief. If you hire well, you’ll end up with a lovely website that demonstrates your brand’s key values. But it may take some time. Meanwhile, you might instead choose to outsource to a web design agency that’ll build you a website and will throw in marketing and maintenance assistance too.

Maintenance

Finally, you’re going to need ongoing maintenance on your website. Little bugs tend to emerge in the code of your site that can, in the worst case, crash your entire website. You may wish to tweak the text on your site or the appearance of certain pages. Or you might simply want to insert more keywords so that your website can be found easier. Keep your website maintained by experts by engaging with smart web design agencies that work with businesses regularly to keep their websites up, running, and looking fabulous all year round.

Marketing

The marketing of your website is almost as important as how it’s built and how it looks. That’s because no one will see your website if people can’t find it on Google or through social media and the likes of Google Maps. Marketing a website involves boosting its performance on search engines, getting it up to page one in search results listings. And it means sharing your brand and your site far and wide on social media for your previous customers, followers, and friends to interact with.

There you have it: five key steps to making and maintaining your business website in 2021.

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