What small business need to know about building their first website

There are a lot of people out there building websites.

What advise to take

My best advise is don’t take advise from someone that only does 1 thing. Sure, when your ready to buy their solution they’ll be great at it. But don’t ask a guy with a hammer if you should use a nail or a screw.

How to invest in your website

Your website is an investment. It should be generating you leads and income over time. You should invest in your website in a sensible manner, in relation to your target revenue/sales.

Starting out

If you’re just starting out, and your target is your salary, perhaps $1k is a reasonable spend. I would aim at something simple, like :

• wix
• squarespace
• weebly
• or pagecloud (these are the new guys on the block,  not sure if they are live yet)

Look at your website as a static brochure, aim to use your phone number and get people to call you.

Most people will be accessing your site via their phone. Don’t go for fancy email contacts, just make sure you phone number is linked so they can click-to-call.

Next stage

when you are aiming at $500k+ revenue, you need to aim for something more dynamic. More content, give aways, lead capture, SEO and paid click advertising (CPC and SEM).

For this you need to move to wordpress, and have a focus on making money from the web. Have a budget of $5k or more, some goes into planning and advise, some goes into build, and some is ongoing costs.

Don’t go for the cheapest solution. Find out what you need, budget 1%-5% for the year for marketing of your target revenue/sales for the year. Spend 25% of that on advise, 25% on a website design and build, and keep 50% for ongoing costs, changes and paid search advertising. Here are some other WordPress tips for small business.

Some lingo for you

domain – like www.cleaningtoyou.com.au . You buy this seperately, see here for more details and advise.

website – this is your webpages, and graphics, and features like contact forms.

website hosting – where your website lives. This let’s people visit your website. Which is what we do, www.wpdone.com.au, we manage your website.

website build – this is what web developers and designers do. There is a few steps.

WordPress – 1 solution to building a website.

CMS – content management system. A fancy name for WordPress. It just means it manages your website contents.

 

By Scott Farrell on February 10th, 2016 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress