Getting a business concept off the ground comes with a lot of expenses. I am a huge advocate of “we all judge a book by its cover” and therefore your website needs to be incredible. Well, at the earliest of stages, it’s okay to build your own website and get some history to your domain name. When you start out, start simple. Get it done in an afternoon and then go back to building the business.
I will say it again, if your business is looking to scale, investing into incredible website design and SEO services may be the best place you can spend your marketing dollars!
I help build, grow and scale WordPress based businesses, so these posts assume you are building your website on WordPress (why wouldn’t you, it’s the best!).
First of all, you need to purchase a WordPress theme.
You can get a theme here from Themeforest.
To install your theme, make sure you have installable WordPress file.
The most common installation theme error occurs when people upload the wrong zip file. You need to ensure you download only the installable WordPress file.
A small business website doesn’t need much to get going.
You’ll need a home page, about us, product or services page, blog and a contact page.
Everything else can be built as you go. These are the basics that tell visitors who you are, what you do and how you do it.
The fonts you use determine how your entire website will look.
Sans Serif fonts are friendlier.
Serif fonts are more professional.
Decide what sort of look and feel you want to portray, to match your brand, then head over to Google Fonts and pick yourself out a font.
I recommend you stick with one font, especially as your website will be small to start with. You can use a bold version of this font for headings and a light version for sub headings or quotes.
Pick a color scheme based on your logo.
A brand for a small website is basically their logo, and making sure everything is consistent with the design, font and color used in the logo.
You can either use different shades of one color, or contrasting colors.
You could also use a light grey as a neutral background color for some pages on your website, where perhaps you have a lot of content.
I actually recorded a video on How To Pick A Color Scheme for your website which you’re welcome to check out below if you need more help on this.
You can upload your logo on most WordPress themes by going to Appearance > Customiser
If your logo file is big, it might be worth using something like Tiny PNG to get a trimmed down version it so your page doesn’t load slow.
On WordPress, you need to set which page serves as the home page of your website.
By default, it displays your posts.
Navigate to Settings > Appearance and you will see two drop menus where can you select which page is you Home and which is your Posts page.