If you plan to run an online business, it’s a no-brainer that you must have a website. But even if you are a brick-and-mortar establishment, having a business website has become non-negotiable in this digital age – if you want to reach as many customers as possible, that is. And we’ll show you how to build a business website with ClikIT Care’s hosting + template solution.
Gone are the days when designing websites was reserved for geeks and programming wizzes. With drag-and-drop website design software, you don’t need to know how to code to design a beautiful and fully functional website.
However, most ‘drag-n-drop’ website software on the market today only gives you basic, cookie-cutter design tools and leaves you hanging. You’d still have to decide on where to register a domain name, find the right hosting package, and choose the right CMS.
ClikIT Care’s Hosting + Template solution gives you all the tools you need to go from idea to a fully functional WordPress website in one place, plus all the follow-up support you’d need to keep your website functioning properly.
In the rest of this piece, we’ll discuss why you need a website, the steps to build your own website from scratch, and how ClikIT Care’s template + hosting solution makes every step easy.
Why do you need a business website?
We use the internet to find everything these days – from the closest restaurants, coffee shops, and hotels nearby, to buying advice and pointers on what to look out for before we purchase a product or service. With a well-designed website, you can position your business where your potential customers are looking.
And if you are an eCommerce business, your website serves as the consolidation point for all your marketing efforts – from social media ads, to email ads and PPC, when it’s time for a customer to make a purchase, they’ll be redirected to your checkout page on your website.
Having a website has also become an insignia for credibility. When people hear about your brand for the first time, they expect to see a website that highlights what your business is about and if you can meet their needs. And speaking of credibility, your website is the best place to show positive reviews and testimonials from previous customers so you can create social proof and encourage a purchase.
So now that you know having a website is important, how exactly do you create one, and how can we make it breezy and easy for you? Let’s dive in!
Steps to build a business website
Figure out your website’s purpose
Whether you are setting up a blog, a portfolio website, a company website, or an eCommerce store, stating the purpose of your website clearly will help you choose the right tools to use and decide on the structure it needs to have.
With a portfolio website, you’ll be creating a portal that gives potential clients information on you, your services, and past projects. You’ll also be showcasing testimonials from previous clients.
With a blog, you’ll be creating a hub that gives readers information on topics and questions they may have on a particular subject matter.
And with a company website and eCommerce store, your website will serve as the central point for potential customers to find more information about your business and if you can fulfill their needs.
Choose a business website template from our suite
The quickest way to get your website up and running in no time is to use already-designed templates with editable fields that you can just replace or tweak with your content.
ClikIT Care offers you a gallery of over 100 exclusively business website templates for you to choose from that have been carefully designed considering the look and feel that a website for that particular business should have.
Select your plan and template, and all the magic happens behind the scenes to have your website designed for you in 1 minute. And the best part? You don’t even need to install the template you choose. Once your website is ready, you can then make all the edits and add images relevant to your brand.
Using a website template saves you the time and money a UI or web designer would charge you. And with our templates, you can also get ideas to get even more creative with your website’s design.
Buy a domain name/register social media handles
After deciding on your website’s purpose and the right template that perfectly visualizes your brand image, it’s time to register your brand’s domain name as well as matching social media handles.
Your domain name is the web address that web searchers will type into their browsers to visit your website and is also the link you’ll be placing in your ads when promoting your products and services.
For example, clikitcare.com is the domain name for the ClikIT Care brand and lands visitors on our homepage. Ideally, your domain name should be an exact match or very closely matched to your business name so that people can find you easily.
It is also a good practice to register your domain name right after registering your business name to protect your brand from domain squatters – people who will try to register a domain name similar to a business’s and then try to make a profit by reselling it at ridiculous prices or stealing potential visitors who taught they were visiting your website.
You also need to consider the top-level domain (TLD) or domain extension when registering a domain. The domain extension is what comes after the last dot in the domain name. So in ‘clikitcare.com’, the ‘.com’ is the domain extension.
You want to register your domain with the ‘.com’ if it’s available as well as other popular extensions like the ‘.net’, ‘org’, and even more descriptive extensions like ‘.business’.
Use ClikIT Care’s free domain name searcher tool to check the availability of your domain name and register it at retail price without any extra costs on renewal.
When searching for your domain name, try incorporating keywords that are descriptive so users can tell what your business is about right away. But remember to keep them short and memorable.
You could also go with a brandable domain name – a unique name that you will build your brand into so that you stand out.
In the end, remember that your domain name is a critical part of your brand and is the name your potential customers will associate with you.
Choose a hosting provider
Next, it’s time to choose a web hosting provider. Aka your web host, your web hosting provider rents you space on the internet to store your website content so that your website is available online, and connects your website to every search made on your domain name.
If you plan to build your website on WordPress, then you want a managed WordPress hosting plan where all the technical aspects of managing your website are delegated to the web host so you can focus on growing your audience and conversions.
ClikIT Care offers some of the most affordable managed WordPress hosting plans on the market with all the goodies offered only by gold-standard providers – free email accounts, free SSL certificates, detailed site analytics, daily backups, free migration, etc.
And the best part? Our hosting packages are WooCommerce-ready for all your eCommerce needs. You get access to beautifully crafted eCommerce website templates to get your shop up and buzzing in no time.
Decide on your website structure and pages
How your website is structured directly determines how easily visitors will find information about your business. As a core factor in your user experience, your website should be structured in a way that potential customers will be able to confirm if you can meet their needs very quickly.
Irrespective of your business niche, your website should have:
Homepage
Your homepage is your brand’s first contact point with potential customers visiting your website. Here’s where you want to make a super strong first impression and build credibility.
The content on your homepage should immediately tell visitors your brand’s core product or service. Your homepage should also have attractive images, short and crisp copy, well-placed call-to-action buttons, and all text should be in a pleasing, easy-to-read font.
About Us page
From your homepage, there should be a direct link to your ‘About Us’ page in the header and footer sections telling visitors about the history of your business – your mission, how you started, your goals, and any achievements you have.
Your ‘About Us’ page is also a good place to show the face(s) behind the brand and you can add a gallery with photos of your team members so your potential customers feel more connected to your business.
Contact page
Many potential customers will have inquiries and may want to reach out to you before committing. You should have a dedicated contact page with several contact portals to reach you. Your contact page can contain – your business phone line, email, social media handles, skype ID, and a contact form so you build your leads list.
You should also include your physical address if you are a brick-and-mortar store as well as your opening and closing hours.
Blog
Having a dedicated blog on your website is an excellent way to optimize your website for SEO and grow your organic traffic. Have a content schedule where you publish blog posts with extensive answers to general questions your potential customers may have about topics in your niche.
FAQs
If you are selling a unique product or service, it’s important to have a dedicated FAQ/knowledgebase page that answers questions about your offering.
From pages explaining how your product or different features in your service suite work, to how-to guides and ‘getting started’ tips, your FAQ page should answer every possible question a potential customer may have about your product.
Testimonials/case studies page
Testimonials, positive reviews, and case studies are a great way to build credibility for your brand and make potential customers more willing to do business with you.
You can have a dedicated testimonials page where you outline positive reviews from people who have done business with you in the past. If you are selling a service, you can also have case studies where you go in-depth into the details of specific past clients outlining the client’s needs, your strategy map, how you executed your strategy to solve the problem, and the positive results it yielded.
Set up your payment method
If you plan to collect payments from your potential customers on your website, you need to have a payment portal in place.
Most eCommerce website building software including ClikIT Care’s comes eCommerce-ready, with built-in payment solutions. Alternatively, you could sign up with a popular payment processor and integrate their payment solutions into your website via their API or low-code/pre-built solutions.
Fill in content with a focus on SEO
Now it’s time to fill your pages with relevant content but keep SEO and your user experience in mind.
Keep your content short and straight to the point so that your pages don’t look clunky. At the same time, make sure to integrate primary keywords related to your brand naturally into your content (especially your homepage).
Test… test… test… then publish
After filling in your content, it’s time to test your website. Test… test… test… and test again to make sure everything is working properly. Load your website on different browsers to make sure it is being rendered properly. Then test each button and click on every link to make sure none are broken.
Next, test your website extensively across different devices – mobile phones, tablets, desktops, and PCs. Google, and many other search engines today have a mobile-first approach to ranking websites. Meaning, they give websites that load properly and quickly on mobile devices higher rankings since most of the searches made to your website will be on mobile devices.
If your website is built on WordPress, consider using a WordPress staging tool. A staging tool allows you to test different tweaks to your website’s code and design safely in a controlled environment, without affecting your main live website.
Hit publish!
Promote your website – social media, email, paid ads
After your website goes live, it’s time to promote your business and direct potential leads to your domain. Remember the social media handles you registered along with your domain name? Set up your social media accounts as business accounts and launch ads on them.
When setting up ads on social media like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, you’ll be able to set your total ad spend, the demographic you want to target, the topics you want to appear in search for, as well as the duration over which your ad spend will be distributed.
You can also consider pay-per-click campaigns on search engines like Google and Bing. Once you start to get visits to your website and leads through your contact forms, you can start setting up email campaigns to nurture leads into loyal customers.
Invest in SEO
Paid ads are a great way to get your business in front of potential customers quickly, but to establish your business as an authority in your industry and attract the best potential customers who are far more likely to convert, you’d need to invest in SEO.
The initial phases of your website’s SEO will involve technical SEO – setting up your website’s backend to make sure it can be accessed easily by search engine crawlers. Then you’d have to optimize your pages (also called on-page SEO) by infusing the right keywords, formatting them so they are incredibly easy to read, setting up HTML tags, optimizing your images with alt text, etc.
However, the bulk of your SEO will focus on the posts and articles you’ll be publishing on your blog. The best approach to your website’s SEO is to hire an SEO specialist and an SEO content writer to manage everything for you.
An SEO specialist will do your technical SEO and on-page SEO for your critical pages – homepage, about us, etc. – as well as carry out topic and keyword research and then build content briefs that the SEO writer will create articles around.
With a well-executed SEO strategy, you’ll be investing long-term into your website’s performance in search engines and will start to attract clicks from searches people are making that contain keywords relevant to your business.
Monitor SEO performance and maintain website
Monitoring the results of your SEO campaigns is incredibly important and will help you figure out what works and what’s not. By linking your website with a website analytics tool like Google Analytics (GA), you have live data on important metrics to your website’s success like clicks, conversions, average time spent on a page, bounce rate, etc.
Many marketing experts suggest setting up your website’s analytics early on once you’re done with your technical SEO and a tool like GA, meshes seamlessly with Google Search Console to help you test your website, fix any indexing issues, monitor your traffic, and optimize search visibility.
Frequently checking that your website software – CMS, themes, and plugins – is up to date is a critical part of its maintenance. Using outdated software can put your website’s security at risk.
ClikIT Care monitors your SEO performance, updates your software, and backs up your website’s data for you, on autopilot. Our managed WordPress hosting plans cater to both regular (non-commerce) and eCommerce websites, and whether you are looking to set up a blog or an eCommerce store, you get all you need in one place.
