Building a website is important when running a business, consider your own buying experience. It’s commonplace to search Google for a product or service, and the sites with the most traffic come up first. If you’re a business owner you want to be visible so having a website or at least a landing page where potential clients can see what you offer and how to contact you is very important. A landing page is a one page website,It’s where a potential client “lands” when they have clicked on a Google AdWords ad or provided link. A website is a collection of pages that has more information that a landing page. A website can contain pages such a home page, about me section,blogs, eCommerce page, contact page etc. The type of business you have should determine the type of web page you should choose.
You have options when deciding how to build a website you can hire a web designer, or build your own using various types of platforms. When hiring a designer you want to make sure that you are getting someone capable of conveying your vision. You need to ask questions before choosing the right one. You need a designer to provide you examples of their work, they need to disclose their skill level, and client testimonies are helpful as well. Getting a feel for a designers work style is necessary so that you have no surprises during the process. Hiring a designer can be expensive for a new business owner so lots of people turn to creating their own sites DIY style. Some popular platforms are WIX, Weebly, Squarespace, Shopify, Godaddy, and Wordpress. They all require different skill sets and some platforms are better for certain industries than others.
Wix is popular cloud based website builder. It offers ease of use combined with a powerful set of features to easily build your website. There are several apps that you can add to your site for functionality and features. Wix has easy drag and drop features and best of all it’s free.
Shopify is a website builder designed especially for online stores and eCommerce websites. It powers more than half a million businesses with 1 million active users. It has an easy step by step function that makes creating an online store a breeze. It’s not free but reasonably priced and you don't have to worry about updates or managing software.
Weebly is an easy to use platform, they have tons of designs and page templates that you can use to create a great website. There is no software, back end work, or coding knowledge necessary to create a beautiful website. This a great site for bloggers or service based businesses not so much for e commerce because of the fees charged on every transaction but you can always upgrade your plan to avoid the fees.
Squarespace is a popular platform due to its user friendly style. There is a drag and drop feature, and the ability to use multiple templates for one site. There is a lot of functionality with Squarespace and can be used in lots of industries.
Go Daddy is one of the largest domain and hosting platforms, it’s simple easy and hosting is done for you. There are lots of great images and rich colors. There is a drag and drop feature that allows your web building experience to be very easy.
WordPress is one of the most popular website building platform almost 30% of all websites are powered by WordPress. It’s an open source web builder which means you have complete control over your entire website. There is a bit of coding involved in WordPress but if you can get that down then your site will have way more functionality and you’ll have more control over your work than any other platform that we’ve discussed here.
Finding the right platform to host your site is extremely important in attracting potential clients and staying true to your brand message. Now that your clients have a place to find you, and find out more about your business, let them follow what you’re doing by setting up social media accounts I’ll show you how in part 3 of Creating a Personal Brand.
