If you own a business in this day and age, being online is incredibly important. One of the first steps of maximizing your digital presence involves having a good website. In this article, we are going to outline a step-by-step process of creating a professional and effective website.
First, Find a Good Hosting Provider
If you don’t have a domain registrar or a hosting provider yet, you will need to find one. Ascenian Digital personally uses A2 Hosting, as we have found them to be affordable and reliable. A2 Hosting provides a wide array of website hosting packages that can fit your circumstances.
Now, why is utilizing a good hosting provider important? In the event something goes awol with your website, it is crucial you can fall back on good customer service. A2 Hosting, in our experience, has consistently provided top-notch support when we needed them.
Another factor when determining who your hosting provider should be is there server uptime rates. We have found that A2 Hosting is up nearly 99.99% of the time, which leaves you no worries regarding potential downtime of your website.
Second, Determine Your CMS and Design
Ascenian Digital builds most of our websites on WordPress, which is an open-source content management system with thousands of plugins and themes available. A content management system makes it incredibly easy to keep your website up-to-date, or make changes on the fly. Usually, your website hosting provider can automatically install it on your website, and take the hassle out of having to configure databases and other more advanced aspects.
As mentioned earlier, WordPress provides thousands of free (and premium) website themes and templates. You can most certainly use a theme or template to build your website on, or build it from scratch. Ascenian Digital uses Elementor to build our websites, which is a free page-builder available through WordPress’ plugin marketplace.
Your website’s design should be relevant to what you do. Trivial aspects of your website, such as the color, can have profound impacts on how it is perceived. Believe it or not, there is science on the impact of colors.
In short, make sure your website’s design is clean and relevant to your industry.
Third, Establish A Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)
When you design your website, you have to first understand what you want your visitors to do. Are you trying to get them to purchase your product or service, or fill out a form on your website? Whatever it may be, you need to make that clear on your website. Otherwise, your potential customer will not know what to do or where to go.
Successful websites are built with the end goal in mind. When your potential buyer enters your website, it must be abundantly clear as to what they should do. Establishing a CTA can achieved through things like adding internal links, buttons, or banners.
Fourth, Make Your Website Mobile Responsive
A mobile responsive website is one that can be resized for desktop and mobile viewing. Since most people utilize phones to browse the Internet, your website must be mobile responsive. Otherwise, it will be hard to navigate your website, and discourage anyone from using it.
In order to make your website mobile responsive, this might involve some level of coding and design expertise. Most modern page builders can handle this for you, but feel free to learn more about our services if you need assistance in updating your design.
Fifth, Optimize for Performance
Slow websites are an easy way to lose customers to your competitors. Not only can it discourage your potential customers from visiting, but search engines might penalize you for it as well. Slow websites might rank lower and get lower Google Ad Quality Scores. Having a lower Quality Score can result in higher cost-per-click for ads, as well as a higher average position.
If you’re utilizing a CMS like WordPress, you can install Swift Performance Lite to speed up your website via caching. Images can be resized to proper dimensions with the help of Smush, which is an image compression and optimization plugin.
When analyzing your website’s performance, there are free tools one can use like GTMetrix. GTMetrix can provide key insights into what you can do to improve your website’s performance.
Lastly, Optimize for Search Engines
The goal of any website is to end up on the first page of search results. Otherwise, the likelihood of your website getting any organic traffic via search engines is slim to none. Optimizing for search engines involves producing authoritative content on a regular basis while building building credible backlinks. The aforementioned aspects (a clear CTA, speed, and mobile responsiveness) can affect your SEO ranking as well.
Optimizing your website for search engines can be a daunting and long process. Producing content, optimizing off-page and on-page SEO, and obtaining backlinks, can take days, weeks, or months. Luckily, Ascenian Digital can help you improve your search ranking, build backlinks, and create content.
In Summary
Building and maintaining a website in 2019 can be a rather simple process, but it needs to be done properly. First things first, it needs to be hosted on a reliable provider’s server, while having a modern and mobile-friendly design. It should have sufficient content that rivals your competitors, and targets specific keywords relevant to what you do. Implementing performance plugins can drastically increase your website’s speed, and indirectly help things like SEO.
Ascenian Digital highly recommends hiring a professional or an agency to build your website. Be sure to do your research before forking over money who claims to be the “best.”
Shameless Plug
Ascenian Digital is a full-service digital marketing agency that works with companies across the world. We have been directly responsible for helping businesses generate six to seven figures in revenue in only a matter of months. We’d love to help you in whatever way we can, whether you simply need some advice or someone to take over your digital marketing campaigns. Feel free to reach out to us today if you need help with your website or digital marketing.
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