Launching a new website can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. In this post, we’ll simplify and walk you through your options for creating a successful online presence. We’ll also cover exactly how to launch a website on your own that will convert customers if you choose to do it yourself.
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Every business needs a fully-functional, visitor-friendly website that is complete with all the integrations and features that deliver a superior user experience (UX). If done well, these elements can increase the reach and revenue of any business. The good news is, you have multiple options for creating a site.
They are:
A website may be technically easier to create than ever, but that doesn’t make you a designer or marketing maven. Creating an effective online presence supported by a beautiful, conversion-driving website takes a lot of knowledge, skill and time to maintain properly. For many small business owners, their best option for launching a website is to pay a professional to handle it. However, that doesn’t remove you from the entire site creation and launch process.
Even if you hire a digital marketing agency to create your site, you still need to guide them and ensure they have a good understanding of your business goals and how that should be reflected on your website.
WordPress isn’t the only open source CMS on the market, but it is the most prominent. WordPress powers roughly 30 percent of the web and is as close as a content management system has probably ever come to a household name.
WordPress is an incredibly powerful tool that enables you to build nearly any kind of site you could possibly imagine. However, it does take some development chops to use WordPress to its fullest potential and there isn’t a dedicated support resource if you run into issues. You’re also responsible for handling hosting yourself and managing all the plugins your site will require to meet the needs of your visitors.
A WYSIWYG do-it-yourself website builder offers a much more comprehensive and streamlined experience for creating a small business website. These platforms generally include hosting and offer a wide variety of native plugins and site features that don’t need to be updated or monitored. These platforms are much more secure than open source CMSs and usually offer comprehensive customer support via self-help portals, chat, email, and (sometimes) even phone.
If you decide to take matters into your own hands and build a website from scratch, this five point checklist will help you demystify website development and provide a roadmap for a successful launch.
Think of building your website as a construction project. Going by that analogy, your foundation is your website platform. It’ll determine the success or failure of your website. Regardless of how beautiful your house is, if the foundation is not quite right, you have a disaster waiting to happen.
When choosing an appropriate platform for your site, decide on what outcomes you want to achieve with the new site – is it a storefront for your offline business? Is it an eCommerce site? Do you envision this site to be the first customer touch point? How do you see customers interacting with your site? What actions do you want them to take after visiting your site? Answering these questions will help you determine the platform you need to run your website.
It’s easy to get confused by the sheer number of website-building options out there, which is why it’s critical that you align your site development efforts with your larger business/marketing goals. That said, there are some basic capabilities you’ll absolutely need on your website. Let’s take a quick look at what those are:
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Next, you need to decide on a domain name for your site. Your domain name will ideally be the same as your business’s name followed by “.com”, “.co”, “.net”, etc. For instance, Amazon’s domain name is www.Amazon.com. If this isn’t available, you may want to add a geographic specifier (like the town your business is located in) or a verb like “get”, “try”, or “go”.
Pro tip: Choose a domain name that is easy to remember, and catches the attention of your prospective website visitors. If your domain name doesn’t have a high recall value, you might lose customers to your competitors. You can check out and purchase available domain names at
GoDaddy.com.
It may be difficult to remember but in the not-too-distant past, the vast majority of businesses used to have physical locations. As it turns out, websites still need them. A website needs to reside on a physical server somewhere in the world and this is where web hosting service providers come into play.
The hosting service you choose affects SEO, how fast the website loads, and even the amount of images, videos and pages your site can maintain; all of which are vital to ensuring that your website visitors and prospective clients have the best experience possible when interacting with your site. There are a lot of web hosting services out there and, as usual, you want to study each of them to understand which one is the most appropriate for your website.
Pro tip:
Most web design platforms like Duda, Wix and Squarespace will include hosting along with the software they provide to design the website.
The web today is primarily mobile. Over 50% of users today use mobile devices to browse the internet and this number is expected to increase to 72% by 2025. To encourage web developers to embrace a mobile-first approach, Google rolled out a change to its search algorithm in 2015 that included mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. However, the search giant didn’t stop there.
In recent years, Google has pushed out
pagespeed and
page experience updates as well to emphasize the importance of website usability in search results. And since
53% of all website traffic still comes through organic search, these are aspects of your website that certainly deserve your attention.
Assuming you’ve successfully implemented all the steps listed above, it’s time to publish your new site for the world to see!
The final step of launching your site live is to populate it with helpful content about the products and services you want to promote, and create a marketing roadmap that includes organic, paid, and social promotion strategies to drive traffic to the site.
When you first launch your site, you’ll want to submit it for
indexing on Google, promote the new site on your social media channels, and add it to business cards, flyers and any other marketing materials you use to promote your business.
While this is by no means an exhaustive list of steps for creating a website, the article intends to help you start with the right mindset. Keep these top five points in mind and ensure that you check every one of them off your list as you prepare to launch your website. Here’s to a successful website launch!
