Do's and Don'ts for Building a Business Website

Photo courtsey www.webranditpromotions.com

In this age of so many free website creators and social networks that can be set up to promote business, many people assume that websites are obsolete. Why get a website when all these other platforms are free?  

In terms of the free website platforms (Wix, Weebly, Wordpress, etc), you get what you pay for. Limited and limiting features. In Wix, for example, you don't have control over your domain name. In Weebly and Wordpress, there are a fixed number of templates to use. And oh, the ads! Unless you upgrade to the paid version, you (and your customers) will be seeing Wix ads, which communicates that you are too cheap to get your own hosting site and pay for a website design company. 

The message you are sending your customers is that you don't have the budget for this essential communication tool for your business. The question has to arise in your customers mind: how will you chintz out on the product or service you will be providing for them? 

When you use a free platform like Wordpress, there is no support for how to use it. Sure, when you come across a problem, you can spend hours googling for the solution but how much of your time is being wasted that you could be using on your business? 

If you are serious about your business, be serious about the tools you use to market it. 

Finally, the reason a free social media platform like Facebook to market your business is a bad idea is because you don't own the platform, it belongs to Facebook. That means the content belongs to them, too. And access to all those customers. So, one day, they may decide that they don't like your page or what you are selling. They may decide to delete your entire page! Or something may happen to your page and there's nothing you can do to fix it. Have you ever tried to get support for a problem on Facebook? 

Obviously, if you are relying on a free web platform for your website, cost is an issue. There are affordable solutions that have everything you need and you don't have to spend thousands of dollars on a website. As you consider different website solutions, here are some do's and don'ts as you get started: 

DO get educated on the basics so that when you talk to a vendor or company, you know what to ask. You can do it! Learn why it's important to buy your own domain, why you should have your hosting account and domain name under separate companies and how a website actually works so you know the parts that are important to a well-running website. 

DON'T hire your nephew, son, daughter, cousin or other family member to build your website-UNLESS they work for a professional website company . Lots of reasons for this but the main one is that if they decide they don't want to do it anymore, you are stuck. You could potentially lose your domain name (see first DO) and other issues may arise that affect your website when they decide to leave. 

DO get a website design company that provides as much responsive support as possible especially if you will be doing the site maintenance yourself. 

DO make sure that the company you hire has basic search engine optimization included in their package. Many people are saying that SEO is dead but I don't believe that is true. There are some basics that you need to have in order to be indexed by the search engines.  

That's all for now and I know it's a lot to digest. I'm here to help, feel free to ask questions in the comments!