Congratulations on deciding to start a new business. If you want to invest your time into building your business, you’ll need a strong presence on the web, but you probably don’t want to invest your time in researching all the technical stuff you need.
So, we’ve put together this quick-list of what you need to get up and running – and get noticed – on the web. Here’s a quick summary of the essentials:
1. A domain name: You need a web address for your new website (like www.enbecom.net). You ‘rent’ a domain name for a number of years and it’s yours for as long as you’re paying for it. You can have almost any name (as long as it isn’t taken) followed by a domain ending. There’s the very common domain endings like .com, .net and .co.uk. Nowadays there’s also dozens of new domain endings, like .bargain, .bike or .boutique, so you can find the perfect domain for your business.
2. Web hosting: When people visit your website, where’s the information coming from? A web server, connected to the internet 24/7 at high speed. Web hosting is space on a web server for your website to live so that people can visit it. There are a number of different hosting packages to choose from.
3. Email: Having access to email is essential. It looks more professional if you have an email address that uses your domain name. All our hosting packages come with email.
4. A website: Once you’ve got 1, 2 and 3, you now need your website. You can either get it created professionally or you can build it yourself.
5. E-commerce: If you’re going to sell products and services online, you need high-quality, secure e-commerce facilities on your website. These let you create a product catalogue with various products and options, and lets people buy products via your website.
6. Payment processing: Sign up with a payment processor like PayPal, who will actually process your credit/debit card payments and help you get paid!
7. Website security: You know that padlock that comes up when using a secure website? That’s SSL. It’s a good idea to add a SSL certificate to your website, to help protect customer information and transactions.
8. A big social media presence: Make sure you have a good-looking page or feed on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and other social media channels. Get friends, family and others to like / follow you on social media and make sure you post meaningful, engaging content as often as you can. We offer a number of social media development and management plans.
9. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Make sure your website is optimised for best placement on search engines. There might be lots of competition in your line of work, so you’ll want to do the best you can to improve your search engine placement. Having a well-structured site with quality content, linked to from other websites, is very important, and there are some other key things that may help your placement, that you might not think would do, such as how well engaged people are with your social media channels, videos you have on your site and the quality of the other sites that are linking to yours. All our hosting packages come with a suite of free SEO tools, or if you want your search engine optimisation managed professionally, we have a great deal for that too.
10. A desire to win and keep at it: Using the web to grow your business and deliver sales can be a long game and you have to be in it for the long haul. Keep your website up to date, keep up to date with SEO trends, keep the underlying software up to date (for security and other reasons) and keep engaging via social media. We’ve got some great website maintenance plans to help you get on with running your business while we do the hard work.
There are of course other key things you should have, like a blog, and of course there’s different views on the top ten. We think the key things above will get you started, get you noticed and help put your business on the path to success.
Do get in touch with us if you’d like our help.
Good luck!