Last week we looked at the top reasons why small businesses need a website, from ensuring your company pops up when people search for you on Google to establishing credibility. This week we’d like to help you ask a few deeper questions you’ll need to answer before crafting a solid site.
What is the purpose of your site?
To begin, what kind of business are you? An ecommerce site will want features that a community site probably won’t, and vice-versa. Are you selling a product on your site? Do you need for it to work with social media to engage with a community? Will it need a calendar to advertise frequent events?
Make a list of all of the information that someone might want to know about your company: address, phone number, links to social sites, product or service information (including photos and how-tos), contact information, and so on. If you’re having trouble, it can help to ask yourself what you search for or want to know about other companies.
Gathering all of this information will guide you when you construct your site or are asking a company or consultant to create it.
How will you create and maintain it?
How will you maintain your site? A consultant can set up a website for you, but it may end up being hard to manage yourself. If you want to make changes, for many people it is ideal to use a content management system, or CMS, which makes it easy to change site pages even if you’re not a web developer or designer.
One of the most common solutions is WordPress.com, another is WordPress.org. The difference is that the latter requires some coding chops; WordPress.com is a lighter version of the two. There are other options as well, like Squarespace, which bundles ecommerce, domain setup (so that you can create your own website URL) and designed templates easily.
Whatever you decide, if you’re uneasy about setting up your own site, it’s good to ask for help. Web development can get complex, fast, and special features often aren’t available without some custom work.
If you still need help, feel free to contact us for a 1-on-1 to talk more— design is at the core of Spark Growth’s offerings.