7 Steps for Building Your First Website
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A known critical step for having your own business is to build your first website. By having a website for your business, you can better communicate your services, discover leads, and help legitimize your business and reputation in the eyes of potential clients and customers.
Whether you offer services or hope to sell products on your website, there are a few things to know before you dive in and create your first website. Here are 7 actions to take when building and launching your business’ first website.
Step 1: Choose a Site Builder or Content Management System (CMS)
At VVITCH, our top site builders and content management systems (CMS) that we use for our website are Shopify, Squarespace, and WordPress. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses:
We recommend Shopify often to ecommerce brands
We recommend Squarespace for service-based businesses with smaller sites that don’t need a lot of custom functionality
We recommend WordPress for those with a lot of content, such as publications, any business requiring tons of custom functionality, or that need to be WCAG Compliant
Of course, each of these platforms vary in overall service cost to you as a business, so that might be a factor when selecting which one works best for your needs.
If you’re still unsure, learn which site builder is better to use.
Important Note: While it may be tempting to let a developer or agency completely manage your website, it’s still important that you as the business owner are set as the owner of the site and have access to the account settings. At VVITCH, we believe great developers and agencies will build websites for you as their clients, in such a way that they are easy for you to manage on your own. Nothing is worse than a developer or agency that holds your site hostage and prevents you from making content edits on your own.
Step 2: Choose a Domain Name
While some site builders, like Squarespace, offer a domain name as a part of their services, you might still want to choose to purchase a domain name from another company, such as GoDaddy.
When choosing a domain name for your business, you want to make sure you include your business name and/or a keyword that describes your services. For example, our site — vvitchdigital.com — not only includes our business name, but as we offer predominantly digital services, it was helpful to include it in the domain name.
For your needs, you’ll want to start with a top level domain (TLD). This is the part of your URL that is either “.com,” “.org,” or “.edu” as these are standard TLDs for websites. There are also hundreds of options for customer TLDs, such as “.studio” or “.shop”, wherein your domain name would be brandname.studio or brandname.shop.
We recommend always using the “.com” TLD option as it is still the best way to convey a URL to people through your brand’s marketing. For example, if someone sees brandname.com printed on a flyer or card, they will immediately know that is a URL. But seeing brandname.shop in print may not immediately convey that this is a URL.
If you do choose to go with a custom TLD, always purchase the “.com” version as well, and set up a redirect to the preferred domain.
Important Note: While some developers or agencies may offer to purchase domain names on your behalf, we always recommend that you as the business owner be the one to purchase your domain name. Your domain name is one of the most crucial pieces of your branding, and it’s important you be in control of that. You definitely don’t want to risk your domain name being stolen from you or withheld by a developer or agency!
Step 3: Determine If You Need to Purchase Hosting Services
While Squarespace and Shopify offer hosting services as a part of their subscriptions, WordPress requires that you purchase a hosting package from a third party provider, such as Siteground or Dreamhost.
You can use WordPress to manage all of the content on your website, the actual content, images, and code files are always saved and stored (a.k.a. hosted) with the third party provider. Be sure to factor this cost in for hosting services when building out a site with WordPress. The pricing does often vary based on the amount of traffic your site will receive.
Important Note: As with a domain name and site builder, it’s crucial that you as the business owner purchase and own your hosting service, rather than relying on your developer or agency to own your account. This is where all your core content lives, and so you don't want to risk losing access to this or having your site go down because your dev or agency’s credit card expired! At VVITCH, we’ll do our best to guide you through the process of setting up these accounts.
Step 4: Outline Your Content
The best way to approach building your first website is to outline your content. Most websites will require a few core pages of content to provide basic information to your customers or clients. This will look like the following:
Homepage: You should outline the majority of the content here
About Page: You should showcase your business’ mission or value proposition aka the value you offer to your customers, and also more about the people who make up your business
Shop or Services Page: This is where you can list your products or services to give customers a clear picture of what you offer
Checkout, Contact, or Conversion Page: This is a page that allows site visitors to convert into paying customers. For ecommerce brands, this is likely where your customer makes a purchase. For service brands, this is likely where your contact page allows people to complete an inquiry form to reach out and contract your services.
If there is nothing else that you outline for your website’s content, make sure that these four are planned and ready to go once your website is live.
Step 5: Select an Email Marketing Service
Email marketing is an owned channel for your business once you have a solid handle on your Email Service Provider (ESP). Most site builders will have email marketing baked into their platform so you don’t have to use a separate ESP. This may be a key factor to consider when you are in Step 1.
By collecting email addresses through your website you build a community of contacts who you already know are engaged with your products or services. We recommend launching your website with a newsletter sign up somewhere on the website.
The way you make your site visitors aware of the sign up option is up to you. You could do an Announcement Bar at the top of your site header, a section in your site footer, or a pop-up on specific pages or all pages that invite the site visitor to sign up — with or without an incentive, such as “X% off” a purchase or service.
Step 6: Acquire Your Legal Documents
If you have an ecommerce brand and you plan to sell products on your website, you will want to have your legal documents in order. And, if you have a service-based business, you’ll want to have the appropriate legal disclaimers on your website as well.
Here are a few legal documents that are critical for running your business online:
Terms and Conditions: This is a basic outline for how you do business, information about where your business is based and what local laws you follow, and also provides protections for your business
Privacy Policy: If you are collecting any personal information from your site users, you need this legal document to outline how their personal information will be used. This includes names and shipping addresses for ecommerce sites or email addresses you’re collecting for a mailing list
If you offer international services, be sure to look into whether there are any additional privacy requirements you need to be aware of, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU
Shipping and Return Policy: For ecommerce sites, be sure you have a clear policy that outlines where shipping is available as well as any shipping guidelines and whether or not returns are available and if so, for how long after the purchase
We recommend that you purchase these documents by using an existing template available with the site builder you’re using to build your first website, or you can use these amazing templates available from Legally Set.
Step 7: Understand the Basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While we don’t expect you to become an SEO expert as a business owner, we believe it’s valuable for your business if you understand the basics. There are a few steps to take to make sure that your site will rank on search engines, such as Google or Bing.
Include SEO Page Titles and Descriptions that take into consideration keywords that describe your business and are short enough, such that they display in full on a search results page.
Structure your page content with Headings and clear content hierarchy.
Be sure you reduce the file size of any site images so they are as small as possible without compromising the quality. Ideally, all images will be less than 500kb in size. Having a website that is slow to load due to large file sizes can hurt your rankings on Google.
Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console for your website so you can monitor your site traffic and overall Google Search performance.
Unsure where to start with these basics?
Learn more about SEO factors for small businesses.
We hope these tips help you along as you build your first website. If you find that you’d rather leave it to the pros or get some personalized help along the way, book a consultation with our team!
Meet the Authors:
Jen Siomacco - Founder and UX Designer
Jen has worked in technology, marketing, education, and publishing since graduating with an architecture degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. While working as a user experience (UX) designer and product manager in the corporate world, Jen traveled the world conducting user research and interviewing customers to ensure their company’s products and services were well designed, accessible, and a delight to use.
Brittinee Phillips - Copywriter
Brittinee has worked in marketing for a little over ten years. She has a passion and talent for storytelling. Brittinee's philosophy is that storytelling is the most integral part of the consumer and product experience, which is why she makes it a focal point in her approach to product and brand messaging.
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