How To Make A Business Website In 2024 (Step-By-Step)

Setting up a business website is a prerequisite for success, whether running a local service business or reaching out to high-profile clients worldwide.

A business website performs many roles, from driving your marketing strategies to showcasing your products and services to your target audience.

This guide will help you set up an optimized business website without any technical knowledge required to drive your company toward long-term success.

How To Make A Business Website In 2024 (Step-By-Step)

If you’re starting a new company or overhauling the online presence of an established brand, getting a business website up and running is key to success.

Read on for a step-by-step guide to getting your business website online with minimal fuss, from finding the best web hosting services to optimizing content for search engines.

1. Determine Your Website’s Purpose

Before you begin building your own website for a business, you need to be clear on its primary purpose.

Even boring businesses must determine their priorities to ensure the content delivers the intended results and attracts customers to their products or services.

On a basic level, a business website is a forum for presenting general information about a company and how it functions within a particular niche and industry.

This could be a simple website with a few pages covering the core information with contact details or a comprehensive site with an online store and other services.

Linking the website to a business plan and the goals and strategies outlined is an effective way to ensure that it matches the business’s purpose.

This will help you develop a website design timeline that includes everything crucial and emphasizes the most essential information and resources.

You can then incorporate these priorities within the ideal user experience to ensure potential customers have a smooth experience when visiting the site.

Read next: How to create a hotel website: A Step-By-Step Guide.

2. Choose A Domain Name & Web Host

A domain name is the unique name that your website will use and should be as close as possible to the actual business name under which you’re operating.

This will ensure that your branding is consistent, with the name also applied to your other online presence, such as your social media accounts.

A good domain name is also essential for optimizing your website for search engines and can significantly impact its ranking in search results.

It should include keywords relevant to your business and be easy to spell, avoiding abbreviations and numbers and aiming to be as short as possible.

Once you’ve brainstormed and selected your domain name, you’ll need to find a domain registrar to register the name and make it official.

The price for registering a domain name varies wildly depending on the popularity and other factors, so bear this in mind if you’re setting up a website on a budget.

You’ll also need to factor in web hosting, which provides cloud storage space, cybersecurity protection for your company, and visitor data protection.

These components are crucial to any small business startup checklist and should be addressed before you begin designing the website itself.

3. Pick A Website Builder

The next step in setting up a business website is choosing a website builder to build your site’s pages and fill them out with engaging content.

Fortunately, many of the best website builders offer free website hosting and a free domain name, combining all these services at a single price.

Website builders offer great features to help small businesses and large companies set up visually striking online presences.

Some of the core features to look out for when choosing a website builder include:

• Drag-and-drop user interface: This style of website-building platform is user–friendly and doesn’t require any web development or design experience.
• Content management system: This mechanism streamlines the management of your assets, such as videos, image galleries, and other assets, for a complete solution to website creation.
• Search engine optimization: SEO is another vital aspect to consider when creating a website. It helps your website appear high in search engines and reach your target audience.
• Customer support: A website builder with a responsive and friendly customer support team at hand will help ensure your site’s performance is always at its best.

You don’t have to spend a fortune when choosing a website builder, and you can find one at a reasonable price if you’re starting a business with no money.

Get started now with Friday’s website templates.

4. Customize A Template

With your website builder selected, it’s time to browse through the template selection and choose one that can be easily modified for your business website.

Website templates are designed to cater to all types of business, with the relevant website pages already in place for you to build your content.

If you’ve researched your competitors and seen a design you like, you can find out who designed the website and what elements they’ve used.

The customization process is easy. The builder’s drag-and-drop user interface allows you to add your company logo and other images to a business website template.

This method allows you to add new page elements, tweak the layout, or introduce new columns and sections for galleries and other visual assets.

You can also switch to another template with a few clicks if the one you’re working on is not producing the results you’re hoping for.

This makes it exceptionally straightforward to create a website that meets the demands of a small business or other type of organization.

5. Build The Core Pages

Once you’re happy with the overall look and feel of the template you’ve chosen, you’re ready to start building the core pages for your visitors.

All business websites begin with a home page, which presents vital information when visitors first arrive, a contact page, and an about page.

The contact page is one of the most important pages to include, as without it, potential customers will not be able to contact you with any questions.

You can use this page to link to your social media accounts and generate a following where loyal customers can share their feedback on products and services.

If you’ve been covered in the media, your press page should link to this to enhance your web presence and demonstrate your reputation.

Each page should also include calls to action that encourage visitors to progress through a sales funnel and generate leads for potential revenue.

These CTAs should be positioned strategically around each page and can be combined with automated speed improvement to optimize the site’s performance.

6. Add Engaging Content

The expression “content is king” is particularly relevant when building a business website since this will help drive traffic to the site and retain visitors.

The digital customer experience works best when approached through a comprehensive content plan that uses relevant keywords and is regularly updated.

One way to do this is to create a website blog that can be used to share insights into your business’s goals and what makes it appeal to the target audience.

These blog posts can be shared on social media platforms for additional reach, written with keyword research to ensure basic SEO practices are adhered to.

If you don’t have the time or writing ability to create the content yourself, you can hire a freelancer from platforms such as Fivver and Upwork on a reasonable budget.

Creating a blog post checklist will also help you consistently maintain and update your website and refine your content pipeline based on the results.

You should aim to produce content that answers the questions your potential clients might be posing and provides them with real value when they visit the website.

There are many excellent tools for freelancers you can use to assist with scheduling and outreach, so spend time researching these to streamline your workflow.

Create engaging content with Friday’s blog builder.

7. Optimize For Search Engines (SEO)

Keyword optimization for blog posts is important, but to achieve the best results, it should also be applied to the entirety of your website content.

While some businesses invest countless hours developing an SEO strategy, you can streamline this process using your website builder’s integrated tools.

In addition to SEO on blog posts and other text used on your web pages, these tools will help you optimize meta descriptions and other under-the-hood site elements.

This makes it easy to manage the technical aspects of SEO without any coding experience, ensuring your internal and external links drive results.

Tools such as Google Analytics can also be utilized to check your website’s performance and make necessary changes to improve optimization.

8. Include An Online Store

Another common way businesses capitalize on a website is by setting up an online store to sell products directly to customers and cut out the middleman.

An online store can be used for selling physical goods, with shipping and inventory management typically included in an e-commerce platform.

Various mainstream payment processing methods can be easily integrated to manage international sales, with tracking tools for delivery notifications.

Alternatively, you can use an online store to sell digital products such as artwork, ebooks, and other digital resources customers seek.

Website builders with this feature also integrate SEO into the process of inventory management and descriptions to maximize search results.

This includes fully integrated digital tools that can be applied to every stage of your sales strategy and deliver valuable information on performance.

They also allow customers to leave reviews and feedback and contact your company if they have any issues with shipping or other concerns.

This results in a smooth, user-friendly experience and can provide an additional revenue stream in addition to your core products and services.

Sell products online with Friday’s e-commerce website builder.

9. Launch & Promote Your Website

Once you’re happy with your website content and have everything in place to manage sales and customer queries, it’s time to launch your website to the public.

This begins with implementing a strategy to promote your website and attract the attention of potential clients or customers who are looking for what you have to offer.

There are several ways that this can be accomplished depending on your budget and resources, such as:

• Traditional paid advertising campaigns: You can promote your website through conventional digital ad and print-based ad campaigns to help establish credibility and drive people to your website content.
• Paid ads on social media: Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow businesses to pay for ad campaigns, with options to target specific regions and demographics.
• Partnering with influential social media profiles: Affiliate marketing with influencers is another popular method small businesses use to reach customers by sharing fresh content with an established audience.
• Email marketing: While not as popular as it once was, email marketing is a great way to make new announcements and updates that target your existing customer base and help develop relationships.

You can also use your social media presence to drive interest in your company and foster ongoing conversations with existing customers who value your products and services.

10. Track Performance With Data Analytics

After you create a business website, it requires ongoing maintenance and updates to ensure its performance improves over time.

This means refining the user experience design and ensuring you continue to add relevant content that delivers optimal, high-value traffic.

You can accomplish this by using a range of data analytics tools, which help you identify content that performs well and highlight issues such as broken links.

Site traffic trends and online store performance can give you valuable insights into visitors’ data and help you make the best decisions about how to bring new content to the site.

You should aim to perform reviews of your site once a month, using the data analytics tools to refine your content plan and fix any errors.

Most builders have an internal dashboard that aggregates all of this information, which will help streamline this necessary task.

Read more about Friday’s simple pricing.

Summary

Setting up a business website is necessary for all companies, allowing them to share their products and services with an international audience and drive revenue growth.

Thanks to the availability of affordable platforms for building a website that includes free hosting and a wealth of tools, establishing an online presence has never been easier.

As your business website generates new leads, you can reinvest in the platform to enhance your visual assets for an immersive user experience.