Creating a Small Business Website

One way of promoting your small business is online. Creating a small business website can be done relatively cheaply if you are prepared to do a bit of work!

So, Where to Start?

Creating a small business website may sound daunting to those of you who have limited experience with web design, HTML, dealing with the major search engines, directory submission, graphic design, working with templates, etc.

You could pay someone else to create your website for you, but when you are talking websites you definitely get what you pay for!

For a professionally designed site it is going to cost you a lot of money, and unless you market the site aggressively offline, you will have no guarantee that people will actually find your site!

Usually the whole point of having a website for a small business is to generate leads for your business. To do that you need traffic, and the best kind of traffic is targeted traffic. Free targeted traffic is even better!

For example - how did you find this site?

Did you click on an add (which would have cost me money), check out a website address on an advertising flyer (which has cost me money and has brought me traffic and new clients), or did you type a keyword into a search engine?

This website has been 'live' for just over twelve months, has cost me approximately $350 USD and most of my traffic (about 90%) so far has come from Google and Yahoo. When you are starting a small business, you are likely to have more time available that money, so the do it yourself option is worth looking into.

Going it Alone

If you have the skills and knowledge you need for creating a small business website, you can probably go it alone.

Do a bit of research on hosting and find the best deal. For a business site reliability is probably more important that cost, as a source of leads you cannot afford for your site to be 'down' for any length of time.

Some hosting companies provide add-ons as well as straight hosting so check out a few of them to find the combination of services that best suits your needs.

To be quite honest, I am not an expert on building a website so there is only so much information I can provide and if you are considering building your website alone, you probably aready know more about the subject than I do!

How can a Non-techie build a website?

You could build your website the same way I did.

I used a company called Sitesell to build this website. This company is based in Canada and provides their clients will a step by step guide to creating a small business website, but also what you need to do to attract free targeted traffic.

Sitesell is much more than a hosting company. It is a community.

While you are going through the process of building your site you have access to other SBI'ers through the forum. People who are going through the same process, and people who have already been through it. You can ask questions, find tips to improve your site and even read answers to questions you haven't even thought of yet!

When you sign up for one of Sitesell's Site Build It (SBI) sites you gain access to all of the tools you need to build your site and you are trained how and when to use them.

Every thing is covered - from researching your site concept and which keywords to use to how to structure your pages to please the search engines and your human visitors!

But Sitesell can explain it far better than I can. If you would like to do it yourself but don't have the skills or knowledge to go it alone, check out the main Site Build it! page, or take a quick tour.

Think you might like to give it a try?

Click here to order your SBI subscription today!

Or perhaps you still have some questions?

Try this link to get your questions answered!

P.S.

Sitesell offers a money back guarantee. If you try SBI and for any reason it is just not working for you, you can ask for a refund! SiteSell.com will refund you 100% within the first 30 days of purchase, and on a pro-rata basis after that, for whatever part of the year remains.