If you are a small business owner, regardless of whether it is owning a store and selling stuff or selling certain services you need to consider building your own business website. Doing business today can hardly be imagined without having a business website. Building a website for small businesses is not expensive and not that hard even for people without experience. For this task, you can choose to use the best website builder for small business websites from many great platforms available to you.
Advantages of having a business website for your small business
There are a number of advantages of having a website for your small business. Here are some of them
- It is cheap to create your website. You can do it on abudget of about 100$ a year for domain name and hosting if you can create it your self. You can also hire a proffessional designer and that will increase your expenses. You can also create your website for free but that is not recommended for a numbe of reasons.
- You will be able to reach even more potential customers. Being online can help you reach more customers. Once you have an online presence it will be easier even for potential customers from other places to find your business.
- You will have online presence 24/7. Online presence for small business is important because now customers will be able to find you and see what you are offering at all times. Even on weekends, holidays, and non working hours they will be able to visit your website and find imformation they need. In any case you could be losing customers to competitors that have online presence.
- You can promote your business online and get even more customers. Once you have a website for your small business you can start prootiing it to get more visitors and more potential cuaomers. You can promote your small business website on socialmedia or use paid online advertising and grow your cutomers base.
How to create your own website for small business
Here is a step-by-step guide to what you need to create your small business website.
Step1 : Register a domain name
This is your first step to creating a website for your business. If you are already a small business owner and are working to create a website for your business then your website’s domain name should be your business name. When registering a domain name you will also need to pick the extension and for businesses, the best is the .com extension. It is highly recommended that Your domain name should also be easy to remember and descriptive of your business.
Step 2: Buy website hosting for your small business website
You will need a web hosting provider for your business website. Web hosting today is also not expensive and prices start from a few dollars a month for the basic package. There are many web hosting companies and many will even provide free domain registration with the web hosting package when you buy. Also if you plan to accept payments online then your website should have an SSL certificate.
Step 3: Build your small business website
After you have secured domain and web hosting you can start building your small business website. Today there are many platforms that make this task easy even if you don’t have experience in designing websites. As an alternative, you can hire a freelance web designer for this job for you. If you decide to try it by yourself there are a number of website builders that can make this job easy as simple drag and drop elements of your website to give it the look you want.
Best business website builders you can choose from
Wix
Wix is a good website builder you can use for creating your small business website. The platform is easy to use and a simple drag and drop editor will make it very easy to get the right look you want from your website. There are many templates to choose from appropriate for any small business. You can also use an all-in-one platform to start selling online. Contact forms to make it easier for your visitors to reach you, schedule appointments, and join your mailing list are also available.
Weebly
Weebly is another great website builder you can make use of to get your small business online. You will get access to many customizable website designs and an easy yet powerful website builder. There are also many eCommerce tools for you to take all things related to selling your products and payments, growing your subscriber list, and your business. Paid plans start from $5 a month.
Squarespace
Squarespace is one of the best website builders for small business websites. If you choose Squarespace you will get access to an all-in-one solution that has all the tools necessary to create a website for your small business and help you stand out from your competition.
You can find many professional website design templates you can choose from for your website. All many tools to help you help products online, manage email marketing campaigns, create shipping labels, and other features to help you run and grow your business.
Jimdo
Jimdo is a website builder that helps small business owners and self-employed to establish their online presence. Their platform is easy to use and has many features. You can build your small business website to look the way you like with an easy drag and drop editor. You can easily insert or remove text or images on your website. Jimdo also offers free images library and their designs are optimized for mobile devices
Webstarts
Webstarts is a website builder that offers many features to help their customers build truly unique business websites. They offer many templates that are responsive and SEO friendly. For your website, you will have access to 700 fonts, an image library, an image editor, and video hosting you can use to make your small business website stand out from the competition.
How to create a small business website for free?
Yes, it is possible you can create a small business website for free and you can start right away. The above-mentioned platforms offer great futures for creating a small business website. There are exclusive features that are available for a certain price but they also have a free plan.
Using a free plan on these platforms makes it possible to build your small business website but this does include limitations compared to the paid plans. For one your website will be hosted on a subdomain. Free plans usually are missing many features and frequently you will have to accept ads on your free small business website.
Free plans are good if you want to test drive the platforms. If you are trying to decide which website builder to choose to create your small business website you should first try them all by using the free plan. After you have seen which one is the best fit for you you should upgrade to a paid plan and your own domain name.
Conclusion
Every small business can get a number of benefits by establishing an online presence. Building a small business website today is easy and cheap using many websites builders available. All of them offer a number of features to help you run your business and grow your business online.
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