When starting a website there are a few important things to consider. Among all these are hosting, design and layout, and making your presence known. These can be great starting places for you. Make sure you find out what is going to work best for you. Then move one to the actual design and layout of your page. Design and how your website looks is major factor in getting and keeping traffic to your page. If you get someone to come to your page, and it looks unappealing then they are sure to back out of the page, which can hurt your page presence. And lastly is getting your page to pop up higher, making your presence known.
Research Hosts
It’s important to look into how your website is going to exist. What that means is, are you going to buy, design, and code your website yourself, or are you going to use a host site? Designing your own can offer a lot of freedom. Meanwhile hosting through a third party is much easier but usually comes with a cost. If you don’t know to code for websites a third party is probably your best bet. There are free options out there, but that usually restricts the type of domains you can get, or the types of designs available as well. Then there are the paid versions, which offer better domain names, and usually have better design options. Find out what works best for you and go for it.
Design and Layout
First steps first, focus on a logo maker to obtain an appeal to your audience for your website. Think of a logo so that people can associate your company with your website. A logo helps keep continuity as they move throughout your website, from page to page. Beyond a logo, it’s important to make your website or web pages appealing and clean. You may not know this but people who visit your page and then quickly click away signals search engines that your page is relevant to what they were searching for. Having a nice-looking page can mitigate back clicks from your page. It’s important to make your page as easy as possible. You want people to feel like they can navigate your site easily.
SEO and Social Media
Part of driving traffic to your site involves search engine optimization (SEO), or marketing for your business or website. Now there are a few options here as well. You can outsource any SEO or social media or you can do it yourself. There are always pros and cons to each. Outsourcing takes a lot of stress and work off your hands but will come with a price. If you end up going this route make sure you do some research into companies that will be a good fit for you. On the other hand, handling this for yourself will save you some money but will require work and time. Another con to this is that it can get confusing quickly. Social media can be simple and can have a big effect. SEO gets a bit more complicated but in essence, means that your page is connected to others, and search engines see this as validation that your page is relevant as well.
There are many things that you can do to start and improve your website. These are three steps that can get you started and have a big impact on traffic and success. Another thing to keep in mind is that you should never really be done with a website. Go back, do more research if you are using a host, and re-evaluate how that is working. Go back and look at redesigning your site, or see where you can improve function or layout. And lastly, you can always use more traffic and that means marketing your website.
Kevin Faber has been in the commercial finance and banking industry for most of his professional life. He graduated at UC Davis with a B.A. in Business/Managerial Economics. His experience in credit analysis, finance, and management led him to be the founder of Silver Summit Capital. He enjoys working in the financing industry and building connections with industry leaders.
