A Detailed Instruction to Create a Commercial Website
What is a commercial website?
Generally, a website that serves the purpose of selling, a product, advertisement, or a service is a commercial website.
5 steps to create a Website:
To stay and thrive in today’s cut through market, it’s essential for trading firms to have an attractive and efficient commercial website. Having a domain name and hosting, creating content, customizing design, and publishing are indispensable requirements in building a website. Here, we’ll suggest you 5 simple steps to create a low-cost website allowing you to communicate with customers and sell products or services.
Step 1: Website’s domain name registration
A domain name is the website’s name and address. You can check if your business name is available or taken by using numerous of domain name checking tool, for example, Instant Domain Search, name.com, Whois Lookup, etc.
After knowing that your business name is available, consider using the.com version over other common extensions such as .net or org., as a .com commercial site to be more trustful for people who are searching for information or products online.
Following are several tips helping you to get an available domain name that suits the brand:
Use keywords
By using words that are likely to be used when searching for your business, it is very helpful for your business’ ranking in search engines like Google. For example, “ProStarLawncare” would be a better choice than “ProStar”.
Limit the use of random symbols or punctuation
A domain name should be kept as short as possible and can be pronounced easily. Punctuation such as dashes, or commas is needed to be avoided.
Use Location Keywords
In the case that all wanted domains are unavailable, adding based city’s name would be useful in creating unique URLs. For example, a company called Smith Plumbers based in Albany, NY, could try www.smithplumbersalbany.com.
Step 2: Choosing hosting provider & platform:
The second step is to decide the place to host your website. A host is a service that stores your commercial website and transmits it to online visitors.
Below are 5 must-know tips before starting to choose hosting providers:
Higher price equals good quality:
As a commercial website is a crucial business tool, it is often a false economy to purchase the cheapest deal or a free one.
Beware of pricing tricks:
Normally, low prices are always being offered by most of the web hosting vendors at the beginning of their contracts. However, when the introductory ends, 24,26 or even 60 months after signing up, these prices can be jacked up. It is always needed to look for the total cost of ownership.
Distinguish trustworthy providers:
Be careful with those faulted companies which resell someone else’s products. This can be prevented by looking for their expectancy, contact address, owners, etc.
Define your limit:
Knowing your comfortability in creating a commercial website, whether you need external help to understand the numerous ramifications that publishing one entails or not.
Consider website builders:
Website builders may offer an interesting and compelling alternative, that you don’t need web hosting to get online. There is one hinter is that you can’t easily migrate your content if you want because of their proprietary nature.
Suggestion for E-commerce websites:
As to build up a commercial website, it is better to choose a solution that specializes in creating an online store. For example, BigCommerce, an e-commerce software that helps to create and manage online stores, sell products, and market business.
Step 3: Website content creation process
It’s highly recommended to have a simple, clear, and easy to navigate website with straightforward text and a single call to action on each page, including Home, Products (or Services), About Us, Blog, and Contact Us pages.
Homepage
This category should be filled with your company’s name, its location, together with a simple pitch that includes several lines about what makes up your distinctiveness and/or the reason for customers to choose your business.
Products or Services
The page should provide specific, and coherent information about the selling products or providing services. A few lines of description for each type of product or service and their prices are needed.
About Us
In this page, visitors can acknowledge your company’s background and list organizational memberships. In order to build trust and credibility, adding customer testimonials is recommended.
Blog
Create an editorial calendar to determine the blog content that will help you contact with customers and your community.
Contact Us
What should appear on this page are the company’s address, email, phone number, working hours, and links to social media accounts such as Twitter, or Facebook. Google map should be embedded, if applicable.
Notice:
Being mobile optimized can boost your website ubiquity.
By altering the layout for smaller screens to make it more attractive, and more user-friendly, a mobile-optimized website adjusts to mobile devices. As for those devices’ comfortability and portability, most of customers tend to browse from their electronic devices instead of their laptops or desktops.
Fortunately, the majority of web builders like WordPress, support your website by automatically create mobile-optimized websites. Another good news is that those websites can detect which type of device visitors are using and can immediately automatically shift the content to provide them an ideal experience.
In spite of its “responsive” characteristic, it will usually work better to make some additional adjustments to the mobile site. Your call to action should be put at the central focus in the mobile version, whether that’s getting users to call your business, fill out the contact form, join a mailing list, or make an online order. Any unnecessary details that might make that more difficult should be removed.
Click-to-call buttons are regarded to be extremely helpful in helping mobile customers to dial your business in a more convenient way by automatically populates your business’ phone number into the visitor’s phone dial pad. An embedded Google Maps widget is also helpful for customers browsing on-the-go so that they can quickly and effortlessly access navigation to your store.
Step 4: Logo design
The color, font, and style of the logo will directly affect the design of the website. Thus, it is important to keep the consistency of the theme between the logo and the web pages.
It would be a lot easier if the logo has already been existed, by having the digital file or creating a high-resolution scan, it is ready to be used for a commercial website. In the case that your business has not had a logo, or you want to upgrade from the existing design, there are three keyways to create one.
Use self-design logo:
Many logo design software platforms can be helpful in designing a unique logo.
Work with a project-based designer:
Despite the hiring cost, it would be great to work with people who are currently active in the designing field, one will probably give your logo creative ideas.
Contact with a logo design agency:
Logo design agencies are known for covering all of the processes of logo design, from conception through initial, designing, editing, and eventual completion. To compare with hiring a designer, the price would go up a little.
Step 5: Website design
In the process of designing a website, it is essential to envision and plan how your site will be laid out, including the colors, fonts, images, page structures, interactive features, copy, and graphics. Less than three seconds is enough for a person to a decision of remaining of leaving once he or she hit a commercial website so that it is imperative to make a good first impression.
Here are a few tips a ensure your website design is up to par:
Make sure to have clear navigation:
Clear navigation can give visitors an instant impression of what your business is about and where to go to learn about your products or services, find pricing, contact the representative, or make a purchase. As being written above, the unclear display can easily chase people away.
Having call to action buttons:
Implementing buttons with clear actions will immediately attract the user’s eye. This helps you to lead the person to take your desired action.
Ensure the loading speed of your site:
Even a fraction of a second too long to long, it would people to leave the site and look for elsewhere. Make sure the web host provider has fast load times.
Minimalism is the best choice:
From the design to every square inch, they do not need to be overdone or fully covered with information, or graphics. White space is a friend. By keeping the look minimal, visitors’ attention can focus on important information.
There are many ways a website can be designed, including outsourcing to freelance platforms or agencies, using DIY design tools, and leveraging website builders.
What do fore-runners say?
More than just throwing up something with your contact, building a website requires providing an appealing visitor experience that performs well in the search engine results pages (SERPs), like Google.
Aran Galligan, CEO, Aide Mémoir
Use a website builder
Aran Galligan
The fastest and least expensive way to create a professional-looking website is to use a website-building platform (e.g., Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, and so on). Such platforms make it easy to create a website quickly with templates or drag-and-drop designs. You don’t need to know to code to use them and most of them have SEO built into them.
Alex Ratynski, Local Director, Roadside Multimedia
Design for the customer
Alex Ratynski
The number one mistake most businesses make when building their website is designing it to their own liking (rather than their users’). A successful website design or build centers around the results it brings in. Be willing to change or adapt based on your customers’ input. Allow your customers to be part of the website process, and, if possible, ask your customers during the build if they like the website and what they would like to see.
Jim Milan, Communications and SEO Manager, AutoAccessories Garage
Choose a customer service-focused web hosting provider
Jim Milan
I would highly recommend going with a hosting service that has an established reputation for providing excellent customer service. This is because if there happens to be an issue with the website that the business owner cannot figure out on his or her own, the hosting company has likely encountered the issue before and can sometimes provide guidance without the need for hiring an expensive developer to fix the issue.
Helpful glossary for the website development process:
While building a website, there is a high probability that you will run into a lot of confusing specialized language, such as “website builder”, “website hosting”, “domain name”, and so on. This glossary will help you make sense of the language used to describe the process and tools to start a website.
Website builder
Website builders are a suite of tools that allow people to design and launch a website without coding skills. Tools include website templates and drag-and-drop or navigation-based menu design tools for further optimizing website layout, colors, fonts, images, images, and more.
Website hosting
Website hosting providers sell the room on their servers (large, centralized computers) to store your website files, where website visitors can then access them via your domain name (www.mywebsite.com, for example).
Domain registration
Domain registration is the process of registering (or renting) your website’s domain name so you have the exclusive right to use it for your business.
Domain name
Instead of a string of numbers in an IP address, a domain name converts your IP address into a name people can remember to access your website online.
Subdomain
A subdomain is an internet domain name that is part of a large or primary domain. For example, WordPress offers free subdomains you can use to create a free website. Their primary domain is WordPress.com, a subdomain would be mywebsite.wordpress.com.
Sum up,
To make a commercial website for your small business, you must choose and register your website domain, choose a web hosting provider and package, plan how your website and logo will be designed, and then design your actual site. Many tools help you do this, including outsourcing platforms or agencies, web hosting providers, and website builders. When done successfully, a website can grow traffic, brand awareness, and sales.
