How to create a business website

After careful consideration, you have decided that, in order to better promote your company, you need to create a website that highlights its strengths, allowing external audiences to easily get to know them. The problem, though, is that you don’t have any web design practicality and you don’t know how to build a business website from scratch.

How do you say? Have I identified exactly the situation you are in? Then let me help you succeed in this – apparently – arduous task: in the course of this guide, I will point out some of the fundamental aspects to pay attention to when designing a corporate website. Furthermore, I will show you how an excellent ad-hoc portal works, entirely dedicated to the creation of websites of medium complexity.

So, without waiting an extra second, make yourself comfortable and carefully read everything I have to say on this topic: I am sure that, after reading this guide, you will have clear ideas on the steps to take to obtain a better result. than professional. Seeing is believing!

Index

• Requirements analysis
  • Choice of name and domain
  • Choice of hosting
  • Choice of the CMS
  • Fundamental pages
• How to create a business website for free
  • Aruba SuperSite
  • Shopify
  • Other solutions to create a free (or paid) company website

Requirements analysis

In order to create an effective and successful corporate website, it is good practice to pay particular attention to its “theoretical” design: although this phase is often underestimated, it is essential to establish guidelines to follow when creating the portal, defining, a priori, an abstract form.

First of all, you have to ask yourself which audience your site is intended for and what information they are destined to draw from it: the goal is to create a  showcase of your works? Or do you need to create e-commerce to be dedicated to the purchase of products? Is the company based on offering direct customer services (e.g. making accounting books, payrolls, graphics work, and so on)?

Having found the answer to these questions, you must then set the concepts of mission (the type of interest that the site must arouse for its visitors) and vision (the ways in which to arouse such interest): these are two concepts that must never be given for discounted, as they strongly affect the final result.

Once this “abstract” definition phase is complete, you can proceed with the definition of the fundamental details of the website, such as its name, domain name and the hosting service to rely on to host everything. These details will be the subject of the following paragraphs of this section.

Choice of name and domain

As it is easy to imagine, the company website is a bit like the business card: very often, even before talking to an “insider” or physically going to the company, potential customers tend to study, carefully, the portal that represents it.

Therefore, it is essential to pay attention to the name of the site, which must be at least  similar to that of the company, easy to remember and, at the same time, incisive. Just to give you an example, for my company I chose to use my name and, to give some consistency, I called my website, precisely, Salvatore Aranzulla. Therefore, if your company is called  We sell good things, it would be advisable to create a portal with the same name.

Having made the above choice, you have to choose the domain to use, that is the main part of the Web address through which to reach the site. In my case, this time, I chose a simple rule to remember and that leads to my person and my company: aranzulla.it.

In general, it is a good idea to choose a domain that is short enough,  easy to remember and that clearly remembers the name of the site (and company) to which it belongs: returning to the previous example, you could opt for a domain of the type vendiamocosebuone.it( if your company has mainly Italian customers) or vendiamocosebuone.com(if, on the other hand, you plan to acquire customers on an international scale).

Otherwise, if the name of your company is particularly long, you can use the acronym of the name or, alternatively, an understandable abbreviation, which is easy to remember, to type and to communicate. For example, if your business name was We Sell Good, Natural and Healthy Things, you could abbreviate the domain to buonoesano.it, or something similar.

One last note: if the company “at the base” of the website operates on an international scale, belongs to a very competitive sector or there is the risk of running into companies with a similar name, try to buy, in addition to the chosen reference domain (for eg nomesito.it), even alternative domains that have the extension .com ( nomesito.com) and .net ( nomesito.net). By doing so, you will limit the possibility that third parties can take advantage of the name of the company to grab an audience that, legitimately, should instead belong to you.

Now, if you already have a web space on which to host your site and you need only the domain, you can refer to my tutorial dedicated to registering a new domain. If you do not have any dedicated space, I suggest you opt for the purchase of a hosting + domain package: I will analyze this solution in the next chapter of this guide.

Choice of hosting

In practice, hosting is nothing more than the  physical space used to host the files that make up a website and to “animate” the relative mechanisms. There are a number of such providers, many of which allow you to purchase complete packages, which include dedicated hosting, domain, and web services.

Generally speaking, suppliers can provide both free and paid solutions: the former, as it is easy to guess, are not very customizable and combine the Web space with a third-level domain (for example nomesito.nomehosting.it) or, in some cases, fourth level; paid solutions, on the other hand, offer a very large margin of customization, a dedicated support team and, for the most part, can be associated with the purchase of second-level domains (eg. nomesito.it).

Another aspect to take into consideration is the type of server to rent: this choice must be made on the basis of the necessary performance and must be studied carefully, in order to avoid unnecessary and / or unsatisfactory purchases.

• Shared Server– is the most common, economical and easy to manage solution. Service providers provide Web spaces complete with everything needed to build a site, even without prior technical knowledge. Resources reside on machines shared by multiple customers at the same time.
• Semi-dedicated server – is the solution chosen by those who expect to generate extremely high Web traffic, or to have to perform complex calculation operations through the server. The resources are located on a complete operating system, in a virtual environment, completely customizable by the user (who must then take care of configuring the various aspects “manually”). As it is easy to suppose, semi-dedicated servers have a much higher cost than shared ones.
• Dedicated server– it is the least economical solution, which provides that the resources are hosted on a complete operating system, installed on a physical machine at the user’s complete disposal. This category of servers is particularly suitable for those who need high computing power, or plan to generate large Web traffic.

So, unless you have particular technical requests, my advice is to orient yourself to the purchase of a shared server hosting package.

These platforms, as already mentioned, provide everything necessary to easily create a website: a certain amount of physical space to be used for the files that make up the portal; a  second level domain (or higher); the ability to create one or more subdomains (e.g. ecommerce.nomesinto.it); server services (e.g. web environment, database, PHP environment, etc.) preconfigured and ready for use; Proprietary or preconfigured CMS for simplified installation; a certain number of email boxes; optional backup services  (for automatic data saving); and optional staging service (to carry out “test” functions on the site).

Depending on the site you intend to get, you have to opt for a hosting solution rather than another. If you still do not have completely clear ideas and you need help in the choice phase, I refer you to reading my guide to the best hosting and my in-depth analysis on how to choose a hosting for your website: you will be satisfied.

Choice of the CMS

Another very important aspect to evaluate, especially if you are not familiar with Web programming, is the choice of the  CMS (or content management system ) that best suits your needs: if you have never heard of it, it is a tool capable of , update and manage entire web portals with extreme simplicity and without the need to have previous technical knowledge.

On the Net there are many ready-to-use CMSs, with different characteristics and peculiarities, based on the website that you are about to create. For this reason, in order to choose the one that best suits your needs, it would be advisable to define a list of priorities and needs: here are some of them.

• The graphic aspect of the portal to be obtained.
• The way of creating content.
• The presence or absence of e-commerce and/or showcase pages.
• Whether or not you need manual development at the code level.
• The monetization, ie the ability to earn from the site by adding advertisements.

In other words, you will have to rely on a different CMS, depending on the site you intend to create: if, for example, you want to create something that looks like a blog, a portfolio or an information showcase, you should opt for a system, such as WordPress, able to create content easily and to act in detail on the graphics of the site; if instead you need to create e-commerce, a CMS like Joomla would be useful, able to easily create product sheets, specify payment and shipping methods and create a landing page to sponsor your business.

Furthermore, in order to improve the performance and indexing of the site, make sure that the chosen CMS has a  clean and light code, which allows you to create responsive sites  (suitable for PCs, smartphones and tablets, with automatic modification of the view based on the size of the screen in use), that it is optimized for search engines, that it has adequate support and documentation and, especially if you are new to it, that it is simple to use.

In this regard, I have made an in-depth study dedicated to the best CMS, in which I have described, in great detail, some of the most used solutions in this category.

Fundamental pages

A successful business website should, ideally, have the information you intend to pass on to your readers and potential customers right there, right at your fingertips. In other words, we should think of it by putting ourselves, literally, in the shoes of the audience for which it is developed! Therefore, below I list a series of pages that, in my opinion, should be present in the company portals.

• The home page: since it is the first page that a user sees when visiting the site, it should be in line with the style of the company, neat, tidy and able to capture attention, but not excessive.
• The About us page: it must contain the history of the company, the values ​​it embodies and the mission of its work.
• The Contacts page: on this page you must indicate the contact information of the company, such as the address (with any indications to reach it by public transport and its own), the opening hours, the telephone/fax number, the email address and, if present, the addresses of the social pages.
• The Portfolio page: this page is designed to provide the reader with a list of the works completed.
• The Testimonials and  Success Stories page: these should show, respectively, the positive experiences of those who contacted the company and the best solution projects completed.
• The Store page: this section must be created if you intend to give your potential customers the opportunity to buy online.
• The Landing Page(s): this is the page that users reach on advertisements on the Net, in which discounts, promotions or particularly incisive content should be inserted. The landing page is indicated where you intend to advertise your company through social media or other types of advertisements (eg Google Ads ).
• The page for the  Privacy Management & Cookie Policy: it is essential if the site in question can be visited by users belonging to the European Community. It must contain information relating to the use of cookies, personal data and any other detail that is attributable to the user’s privacy. Fortunately, many CMSs include a wizard to easily create pages of this type.

How to create a business website for free

Once you have defined the characteristics relating to the website that should represent your company, it is time to explain, in practice, how to make it happen. My advice is to opt for a paid solution, as the services offered are much more in line with the result you should get.

If, however, you want to do some practical experiments before _opening your wallet_, let me show you how to create a free business site using  Aruba SuperSite, a hosting service (with proprietary CMS), which provides a free trial period of 30 days. .

Aruba SuperSite

As mentioned above,  Aruba SuperSite is a complete hosting solution, designed for the creation of medium-complex Internet sites based on HTML5 and CSS3 technologies. The portals thus created can be extensively customized in design, are optimized for mobile and search engines, and compatible with the integration of blogs and e-commerce sections. At the time of writing this guide, Aruba SuperSite can be activated with 3 different plans.

• SuperSite Trial– This is the free 30-day trial of the SuperSite Professional plan. A third level domain (e.g.mysupersite.it) with 24/7 assistance is included. With this plan it is possible to create sites optimized for mobile devices and equipped with a blog component, e-commerce, SEO options and Cookie Policy, even multilingual. After the 30-day trial has expired, the site is no longer accessible and there are 10 days to proceed with the purchase of the SuperSite Professional plan, with the replacement of the third-level domain with a second-level one. After 10 days, if no upgrade is performed, the site is deleted.
• SuperSite Professional– as already mentioned, is the full version of the previous plan. Includes a second-level domain (it), free 24/7 support, 5 mailboxes and DV SSL certificate. With this plan it is possible to create websites, even multilingual, optimized for viewing from mobile devices, with SEO options, Cookie Policy, blog component and e-commerce section. Currently, the service costs € 39 + VAT for the first year, in promotion for new activations until July 30, 2020, then € 99 + VAT/year.
• SuperSite Easy– this is the cheapest plan from Aruba SuperSite. It includes a second-level domain, free 24/7 support, 5 mailboxes and SSL DV certificate. It allows you to create sites optimized for mobile devices and with blog functions, Cookie Policy and SEO options. It costs € 39 + VAT / year.

If you are interested in taking advantage of the trial version of Aruba SuperSite, click here to connect to the main page of the service, press the  Try free for 30 days button and, if you have an Aruba account, enter your credentials in the appropriate fields and click on the Login button to log in.

If you do not have an account, use the New user section and answer the questions that are asked: indicate if you are a natural person, company / sole proprietorship or other person, click on the Register button and fill in the forms displayed on the screen with the requested information.

Once logged in, check the boxes relating to acceptance of the  Conditions of supply of the service and of the  Clauses of the conditions of supply of the service and click on the Continue button.

After this step too, you can finally start the creation of your site: connected to the SuperSite editor, indicate what type of website you are creating by typing an indicative term in the appropriate field, choose the most similar suggestion among those proposed, click on the button  Continue and then specify the website name and press Continue again.

At this point, choose the style of the site, selecting one of the available templates and identify the home page template that best suits your case: through the live preview, you can immediately see the performance (to view the mobile mode, click on the smartphone icon located at the top left) and, when you are satisfied, click on the Create your website button, to create the initial prospectus and start filling it with content.

The SuperSite editor, as you can see, doesn’t need much explanation: use the ☰ button to access the various sections of the portal ( Site Editor,  Shop or  Blog management,  Help / Tutorial page,  Site settings and Account management ), while using the central drop-down menu you can choose the page to edit.

The central part of the SuperSite editor shows the content of the page to be edited, together with all the tools necessary to add text,  images, slideshows, maps, contact buttons, product lists,  purchase buttons and many other types of elements,  forms and widgets.

At the bottom, however, there are buttons to add new sections to the page (the (+) icon  ) and to add new pages/elements to the site (the four squares icon ); finally, the right sidebar allows you to change the design of the site on the fly  , change its display mode ( desktop or mobile version ), or publish it (then choose the domain to use).

As you can easily guess, the methods of use of the SuperSite management software vary according to the type of site you are preparing to create, as well as the content you intend to insert within it. If you are interested in further exploring the topic, read carefully my guide dedicated to the creation of a website with Aruba , in which I have dealt with the topic in depth.

Shopify

If what you intend to create is a company site that focuses on e-commerce, I can only recommend Shopify: an extremely simple service to use that allows you to create online stores with unlimited products, unlimited secure hosting, free unlimited bandwidth, free domain name shopify.com (with the possibility of replacing it with a personalized one) and everything you need to easily manage products, customers, orders, payments, shipments, inventory, etc. It also allows you to carry out marketing campaigns via social networks, email or SMS, to use the Facebook sales channel to synchronize your products with a catalog on the social network, create marketing activities on the latter and take advantage of the purchase function.Instagram Shopping.

You can try Shopify for free for a trial period (no obligations), after which the service offers various plans starting at $ 29 / month. To start the trial, connected to the official Shopify website, type your email address in the appropriate field and click on the Start free trial button. Then enter the password and name of the shop in the appropriate fields, click on the Create your shop button and fill in the additional form that is proposed to you indicating whether you have already started selling, what your current income is, in which sector you want to operate and if you are creating a store for a customer.

At this point, press the Next button, enter the address data to receive payments and press the Enter the store button to start setting up your store. find everything in the left sidebar, where there are options to manage orders, products and customers, view sales data analytics, manage marketing, discounts and so on.

Finally, I would like to point out the availability of the Shopify app for Android (available on the Play Store and alternative stores ) and iPhone / iPad (available on the App Store ) to manage your store even on the move. If you want to know more, read my guide on how to create an e-commerce with Shopify.

Other solutions to create a corporate website

Have you had the opportunity to thoroughly test the previous solution and do you think it is not for you? If this is the case, I recommend that you consider one of the hosting platforms + CMS that I list below.

• Wix– is a famous portal that allows you to create professional sites with the help of artificial intelligence. In its free version, Wix offers 500 MB of storage, 500 MB of bandwidth, a domain of the typewixsite.com/nomesiteand advertisements. These limitations can be removed by purchasing a paid plan, with prices starting at € 4.50 / month.
• Webs– another famous service for creating professional websites from scratch and without specific skills. The free version allows you to create a site with a third level domain (nomesito.webs.com); By opting for a paid plan (with starting prices of $ 5.99 / month), you can get second-level domains instead.
• Blomming– is a portal that allows you to create e-commerce sites, with personal spaces dedicated to sales. For businesses, subscription plans are available, with prices starting at € 29 / month + VAT and withholding of 2% of commissions (billed on a monthly basis).

To learn more about these and other useful solutions for the creation of corporate websites, take a look at my guides on how to create an Internet site, how to create a professional site and how to create an e-commerce site: I am sure that they will help!