How To Make Your First Business Site: 5 Main Steps

There were times when it was intimidating for vendors to move their business online: it was too expensive and not really profitable… But not anymore.

 

Now we live in an era of digitalization and online marketing when people prefer to search the Internet to find the needed services, learn more about your business and finally buy online. 

 

Fortunately, creating a business website is not as expensive to develop and support as it used to be before. For lots of businesses building a business web-site may appear to be the best investment.

 

In today’s blog post, we will give you some tips on how to make your first business site.

 

Step 1: Set Your Goals

 

If you are reading this article, I suppose you already have some idea of your future business website. But before you start turning your idea into a business plan, think of:

• What is your goal of creating your business website?
• How can your website is going to help customers?
• What are the expected benefits from your website?

 

Answering these questions will help to make your website idea more structured and set the basic goals before moving to the development phase.

 

Step 2: Choose Your Team

 

Basically, there are two main models of software development you are going to choose between: offshore development and in-house software development.

 

Why choose offshore development:

• Cheaper prices for development;
• No need to manage the employees;
• Access to the global pool of talents;
• Saving time and money spent on recruiting.

 

Why choose in-house development:

• Easy communication and coordination;
• Full control of the process;
• Ability to make quick changes;
• No language or time barriers.

 

No matter what type of team you will choose, check the portfolio and customer reviews of those offshore companies or your potential in-house developers. Try to meet them in person to improve communication in the very beginning of the project.

Step 3: Start With Discovery

 

Some vendors ignore this step as they see it as a useless waste of time. But it is not!

 

We see the discovery phase as a base of any future project, as far as during it you can:

• Conduct market research to see what your competitors do…
• ...and who are your target audience;
• Set the product requirements and make a list of must-have features;
• Choose the technologies for the future business website;
• Create a risk management plan to avoid mistakes during the development process.

 

As a result, the discovery phase helps you to determine the key points of development, see what unique features you can implement and think about how you can outstand the competitors.

 

Besides, we highly encourage you not to start with developing a fully featured website from the very beginning of your website project. It is much more cost efficient to start with building a minimum viable product and then steadily add new features to your website.

Step 4: Go To Production

 

Let’s look at the core 5 stages of software production.

 

• Choosing a domain name

 

Surely, the success of your business will not depend on your domain name.But still domain name is one of the most important features of your future website. It's the URL you'll be sharing with your current and potential clients and promoting on social media. How to choose a domain name? The domain name should be short, catchy and descriptive. Try to avoid numbers and abbreviations so you won’t confuse your customers.

 

Once you decide on your domain name, do not forget to make sure:

1. It is available, so there are no other websites with the same name as yours.
2. It can be copyrighted, so you do not violate any copyrights.

 

• Choosing a web host

 

To make your business website available for the customers, you will need a web host: a server to store all the data to make it available for the users. For small businesses, it is worth considering selecting an external host, as far as it is easier, faster and cheaper to connect than building your own server.

 

As your website and your traffic grows you might need to upgrade to another web host. Moreover, you can start collaborating with several hosts at a time. You can consider it for the future and come up with your host maintenance plans.

 

• Coming up with tech solutions

 

When you start to develop a website from scratch, it is worth considering technologies that can facilitate the launch of your website.

 

The most startup friendly technologies are such framework Ruby on Rails or languages like PHP: they provide developers with a number of free tools and libraries and it makes the development more time-efficient. 

 

• Implementing a payment provider

 

It should be noted that this feature is necessary not for all kinds of business websites. The implementation of payment is a must-have if your business website offers some online purchases. There are several online payment solutions on the market you can choose from.

 

The most common and popular online payment gateways are Stripe, Braintree, MANGOPAY, Adyen, Skrill, Dwolla, and Amazon Pay.

 

• Quality Assurance

 

By quality assurance is meant testing the final product. Even if you hired a good professional team, you have to make sure that your website works on all major browsers, like Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Besides, do not forget to check if the website is mobile-friendly: all the above browsers should work correctly on both Android and iOS platforms.

 

Step 5: Promote!

 

Nowadays without marketing your online product just does not exist.

 

Make your potential customers know about your website: promote it through social media and other online channels. Use different social media to increase your audience reach and alert customers and clients about what's going on with your company:

 

• Facebook - to post news posts about your company;
• Twitter - to make short news messages;
• LinkedIn - for business needs, networking or even hiring;
• Instagram - to post pictures of your products or services and show your customers how you arrange the working process inside the company.

 

Plus, do not forget SEO or also search engine optimization. Use title tags, meta-descriptions, and optimize your website pages. These and other SEO optimization activities will help the search engines rank you correctly and help your customers find your website in the search results. 

 

In short, to develop your first business site, you will need:

 

1. To come up with a well-structured plan for your website development;
2. Choose a reliable team;
3. Conduct a discovery phase;
4. Choose the core features for the first version of your business website 
5. Conduct development, testing, and maintenance;
6. Promoting the ready-made website with SEO and social networks.

 

We cannot describe you this feeling when your idea turns into an existing project - you can and should experience it yourself!

 

Prepare for a long way, but after all, it is worth it.