How do i set up a website?
How do i set up a website? The steps to take when setting up a website can be difficult to distinguish. In this post, we aim to simplify the steps you need to take towards developing a professional website for your business that functions efficiently. The aim for any business should be to ensure that your pages can be easily navigated by internet users whilst appearing sophisticated. The unique nature of your business should be reflected by a bespoke site that accommodates the features you require. For more tailored information, contact us here at Orangedot Media and we can guide your website build journey. We use the CMS (Content Management System) known as WordPress to develop sites because of the support community and the availability of plugins to add advanced features to enhance your website. Over 43% of websites use WordPress as their CMS.
The first step toward developing a website is to purchase a domain name. This refers to the part of the URL shown in bold in this example: https://orangedotmedia.co.uk/. This should directly refer to your business and be easy to spell, memorable and short. It is best to avoid numbers and hyphens while ensuring the domain name is broad enough to facilitate any future growth of your business. Nonsensical names will deter website visitors so it is paramount to conduct your own research when choosing a domain name, especially to ensure you are paying a reasonable, appropriate price for the purchase. The URL extension should also be correct: it is recommended to stick with ‘.com’ unless your website operates exclusively in one country, for example, the UK ‘.co.uk’. A sophisticated domain name and URL will contribute to your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy.
Any professional business will display a sensible, refined logo. Hiring a website developer will allow you to explore different logo options with their designer. Take a look at our ‘How to design a good logo’ post for more information. The basics of designing a good logo involve creating something eye-catching, timeless and memorable that will encompass the personality of your brand in one image. As is recommended for all stages of web development, planning is essential. Try writing down words that best pinpoint the ‘vibe’ of your business. It is important to remember that your logo will be one of the first features of your website that will be seen by potential clients.
In order for your website to be viewed online, you must have a hosting plan in place. Web hosting refers to the upload of files from a local computer to a web server for the site to be viewable by internet users. There are different types of servers available for websites, namely shared servers, VPS (Virtual Private Servers), dedicated servers, cloud servers and reseller servers. Hosting providers usually offer plans that provide different bandwidth allowance levels and file capacity. Visit our ‘What is hosting?’ post to discover more about how to identify the best hosting plan for your business. Anticipating the traffic you will receive on your website and the scale of customisations you may need to carry out is essential when selecting a hosting package. A good hosting provider will also have technical support available, so ensure that the provider is easily contactable and willing to help.
The majority of your website will comprise of written content, which must be well-written and of high quality. Website development companies often provide an in-house copywriter and proofreader. At Orangedot Media, our copywriter turns your ideas, however big or small, into professional copy that can be regularly published to maintain the freshness and consistency of your website. As an SEO strategy, frequently publishing relevant content will improve your website’s rankings on google, in turn improving engagement. How do i set up a website? Your content must provide users’ queries with a solution that is direct but thorough. Your landing pages should maintain succinct and sophisticated content, whilst publishing blog posts will ensure that your site stays relevant and ranks higher on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). To learn more about the role of quality content in SEO, visit our ‘What is SEO?’ page and improve your rankings on Google.
A hero page is the term used to describe the ‘first impression’ website page containing a banner image at the top. This hero page will be the first to be shown to website visitors so it is extremely important to engineer this hero page as a good visual representation of your business. During the website development process, drawing rough sketches and mind maps will help to gather ideas for the desired appearance of this page. Similarly, competition analysis can allow you to gain insight into successful hero pages from businesses like your own. This factor is vital to reducing the bounce rate on your page. If your hero page is engaging and enticing for internet users, they are more likely to spend more time on your page and less likely to immediately click off it. Webmaster tools give a statistical insight into your bounce rate and other analytics such as the number of website views, visitors, time spent on your site, and download time and can help to identify crawl errors. Once your website developer has designed a draft of your hero page, ask for the opinions of others to find out how a human audience will respond.
A call to action (CTA) is a marketing strategy referring to written directives in the form of text hyperlinks, buttons or plain text. Examples include ‘Contact us’, ‘Buy now’ or ‘Subscribe today’. These call to action features make a website easy to navigate for users and provide guidance on how to interact. CTAs are known for their ability to create a sense of urgency and consequently improve engagement with your website. This marketing strategy has the potential to substantially increase leads for your business. It is fundamental to ensure that these CTAs are incorporated into a functional website so that visitors can receive the information they require. As an example, a CTA button of ‘Contact us’ should correctly redirect the user to a contact information page. If the site does not operate in its intended way, your bounce rate may increase and your website traffic will decrease.
Social proof is integral to any website build. Displaying testimonials and reviews from previous customers will encourage prospective clients to engage with your website and generate more leads. This marketing strategy gives website users an idea of your business personality and will contribute massively to their decision of whether they will want to work with you. It is important to encourage past clients to voice their opinions of their experience with your business, and creating a space within your site architecture dedicated to social proof means that these opinions are easily accessible.
Setting up a website can at first seem daunting but it is helpful to organise your website development journey into the following headings: domain, hosting, content, hero page, call to actions and social proof. It is always important to plan your desired outcome for a website so that your developer can reimagine your ideas with their technical and creative knowledge.
If you are still wondering how do i set up a website?
Contact us at Orangedot Media today to learn more about the website development process and what steps we encourage you to take.
How do i set up a website?
