To create a company website is very easy, quick and cheap. Web agencies tend to ask prices that are at least 10 times the real cost but you have to understand something: the most important thing and where you should invest most of your budget for the online, is the SEO (search engine optimization). This means, you should not spend lot of money in the design and structure of the website because you can find extremely well advanced (full responsive for example, for iphone, ipad, etc) and beautiful website for less than 100 usd.
The other part where you should put some money, is the choice of the hosting provider, that is where your website will be hosted. it has to be rapid, performing well (there are different parameters to look at) and with an excellent customer service that will reply quickly to all the issues or questions you will have.
A website can have two major functionalities:
- to introduce your company profile, contact details and your products
- or to sell your products B2C (to consumers) or B2B (to other companies)
In this page we will talk about the first point: a website that is used to give an online visibility to your company. For e-commerce site, i will dedicate another page because it is a completely another business which requires different organization (logistics for example), know-how and platform knowledge, like Magento.
So, here are basic steps on how to create your company website used as window to present your company profile and your core products. I suggest to use WordPress as platform because it is easy, free and very flexible in customization.
- go to themeforest.net and choose your desired WordPress theme.
- You can eventually look into the sub category “Corporate” but the other sub categories may satisfy your design expectations as well.
- i recommend to filter the view with “popular items” or better, to use the filter on the left panel and choose “sort by: best sellers”. in this way you will see themes (sites) that are sold very well, that are very stable and updated regularly.
- you can see the Live Preview of those themes by clicking the “Live Preview” in each theme you click. this will give you an example of that specific theme with some example content (pictures and texts). Remember something very important: when you buy a theme, you can choose to import also the example content (the Demo datas) or to receive just the empty site, which is the structure of the website. This means that when you look at those template, imagine your products images and texts instead of those examples…
- buy a domain name for your website. It can be the name of your company or the name of your brand if you have one.
- if you buy .com domain name, there are lots of providers. i personally use godaddy.com
- buy a performing hosting provider for your wordpress website, where you will upload your purchased theme (at themeforest). there are loads of hosting providers. most of them propose also a domain name for free, so that you do not have to buy it from godaddy. Godaddy provides also wordpress hosting anyway. other excellent hosting providers are hostgator or siteground or vidahost
The procedures to build your website
Now that you have a domain name, a hosting provider and a theme, you need to:
- point your domain name towards your hosting provider
- this is usually done automatically if you buy the hosting package and the domain name from the same company. if it is not the case, just ask the domain name provider clients support to help you in that
- go to the backend of your purchased hosting package, and look where it is written to upload the WordPress app on it. it is free.
- once you have uploaded the WordPress app, you will be able to login on the backend of WordPress. By default wordpress comes with their theme/design. You will need to change it with the one you have purchased at themeforest.net
These are the general rules. For the details, just ask here below, or ask google or youtube. On Youtube there are hundreds of video tutorial in any language, that can give you all answers to your questions.
Last steps to build your company website
Once you have everything online with your desired theme purchased at themeforest, you need to create the content for your corporate website. Content is: images and texts.
It may seem the easiest part, but in reality it is the most difficult. Content has to be optimized for the web, with clear pictures, very well done and with low weight in terms of Kb. Please refer to the other tutorials i gave here regarding taking the pictures.
I always recommend to buy professional pictures that match your company products from istockphoto.com , especially pictures such as your “team picture” or similar. here an example.
Texts have to be well written, interesting and descriptive. Eventually you can hire someone on freelancer.com or elance.com that can write for you the texts or even create the whole content for your website. their services are cheap.
Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools etc
To finalize your work and to follow up both the health of your company website and the audience that visit it, you have to create an account on google analytics and on google webmaster tool. Then once you have them linked to your website, check them regularly (especially google analytics).
There are apps (called plugins) for WordPress that ease your work to link your google analytics account to the website. One example is Yoast.