Setting up a business website

Thursday 17 November, 2011

By Kelvin Goodson - kelvin@consumerchoices.co.uk

Is it time for your business to join the digital age and begin to establish itself online? Then read on for advice from Businesschoices.co.uk on how to go about setting up a website for your business.

While cost will always be a key concern for any business, remember that your company's website will be its “shopfront” online, so there are plenty of other factors to be taken into consideration.

As startup advice website SmallBusiness.co.uk says, while the right website can help your business to grow, the wrong website “will be overlooked almost as soon as it’s been visited”.

Type - The blessing and curse of websites is that there is no fixed format. Think about what type of website would work for your business - how it will serve your existing customers and help you get more. Look at the websites of similar businesses, discuss your ideas with an IT expert and web development agency and seek advice from an impartial source such as Business Link, the government’s online business resource.

Design - How your business website looks and works will play a huge part in how easy or difficult it is to use. Your website needs to be simple enough for users to be able to identify what your business does within seconds of visiting, yet eye catching enough to make them stay rather than going elsewhere. It must also be very easy for visitors to navigate, because if they can’t find what they want, they won’t stick around.

Accessibility - The Equality Act 21010 makes it illegal for a website to discriminate against a disabled person through not providing them with a service that is generally available, providing them with a lower standard of that service or failing to make reasonable adjustments. Websites can easily be optimised for disabled people to use, such as providing text descriptions of images so blind visitors that use a speaking browser will get a description of the image, and this needs to be taken into account when designing your site.

Content - It sounds obvious, but what are you actually going to have on your website? It has to offer some value to users, whether that is through ecommerce - selling your company’s products or services directly through the website - or information - advice, industry news or news about special offers, discounts and new products or services. Remember that a website that is never updated is like a TV channel that always shows the same programme.

Domain name - This is the unique label that identifies your business website, such as Businesschoices.co.uk, and therefore you must pick something that has not yet been used. It is also good practice to pick something memorable, keep it as short as possible, avoid trademarked names, avoid hyphens and, obviously, to pick something that is relevant to your business. Then you need to register it before someone else does.

Hosting - A web hosting service is basically what makes websites available to everyone on the internet. Your business will need to choose a hosting company that will provide space on a server for your website and connect it to the internet. Reliability, speed, space to expand your site, technical support, email addresses for your website, security and, of course, price, all need to be taken into account.

The technical side of website design

It is very easy to forget when setting up a website for your business that the website is for your customers, not for you. However, researchers comScore recently revealed that the number of smartphone owners in the UK shopping online is growing faster than in other leading European markets, and this is a prime example of why it is important to take the following technical considerations into account when designing your website:

• Browsers - Remember that visitors to your website will be using any one of a number of browsers - from Chrome to Internet Explorer to Firefox to Safari and so on - and each one will display webpages differently and support different features. This means your website needs to be tested with as many different browsers, and different versions of those browsers, as possible
• Broadband speeds - Your customers will also be accessing your website via a wide variety of broadband connections. This will need to be taken into consideration in terms of the size of your websites pages and the size and amount of images and video and audio it incorporates. If your pages take too long to appear, then your customers won’t stick around
• Screen resolutions - You will also need to take into account the hardware visitors to your website will be using. While modern computer displays have higher resolutions, if your website is designed for higher resolutions some of the content may not be displayed on lower resolution screens<>/li>
• Mobile devices - As mentioned above, it is increasingly likely that your customers may visit your website via a smartphone or a tablet computer such as the iPad. If this could be the case then you must also take into consideration how your website will appear on these devices