Essential Tips for Your Startup’s Website

In the current digital age, having an online presence is crucial. By building a website for your startup business, you can sell your products and services around the world and around the clock. As overwhelming as creating your own website might seem, it actually isn’t that difficult (or expensive). From building your webpages, to designing your content, we’ve got some fantastic tips to make sure your startup website stands out.

Before You Begin

There are three key questions you need to answer before you start creating your business’ website:

1. What purpose will your startup website serve?

A great place to start once you’ve identified the need for a website is to uncover what you need your website to do. For example, are you creating a website to give more information about your startup company and its products and services? Or, do you want your website to act as a direct e-commerce platform where customers can browse products, add them to a basket on site and also order them? Knowing the purpose of creating a website for your startup means you can keep that in mind at all times throughout the process

2. What’s Your Domain Name?

Choosing your domain name should be next on your website-building agenda. This is your website name – the address people use to access your website. For example, our domain name is www.instantprint.co.uk. You want something short and easy to type and remember. It’s also great for your site’s SEO if your domain name represents who you are/what your startup does. Make sure you’re happy with it; you’ll need to give this out to current and potential customers!

Once you’re happy, you’ll need to confirm the availability of your domain name and then purchase it. If you type ‘Domain name search’ into a search engine, there are loads of tools to help you figure out if your domain name is available. If it isn’t, and you really want it, you could try contacting the existing company who’re using that domain name and asking if you can buy it off them.

3. Who’s Your Web Host?

Where your website is being hosted is really important; it’s the foundation of the whole site. As a startup, price will be a huge factor in deciding your web host, but it’s important to choose the right one for you. Entrepreneur Europe have a helpful list of different options for hosting your startup website, all of which take into consideration cost and business size.

Building Your Website

1. More Than Just a Homepage

Remember that your website is more than just a homepage. Depending on the purpose of your website, you’ll need other pages (product pages for an e-commerce website, or maybe a blog for an informational website, for example). Your website should be dynamic, with pages dedicated to specific things.

Quick tip: Make sure your website navigation is easy to use – that it’s obvious how to find things from the homepage. You could increase usability even further by adding some CTA (call to action) buttons on your homepage in a contrasting colour to attract attention to important pages (like we do)!

(*This is an example image, prices may vary)

2. Set Up Your Payment System (If Applicable)

If you want to sell things on your startup’s website, it’s essential that you set up a payment system to allow for this to happen. If you’re not sure which online payment system you’d like to use, merchantmachine.co.uk have compiled a list of the most popular and easy-to-use options for UK businesses.

3. Inform Visitors with Video

As a startup, the chances are that your website has fewer seconds to show a visitor your products, services and, more broadly, what your business is about than an established company’s website might – visitors may not always take the time to trawl through your entire website, reading about your different products. So, why not try including a video on your homepage? It’s much easier and quicker to digest information in a video than in a paragraph or more of text.

We particularly like the video Scribe use. Scribe’s video features a brief section of text communicating who they are and what they do in a contrasting white font across the middle of their video so you don’t need to turn the sound on – this, again, is a choice that’s been made to make it easier for visitors to their website to understand the service this company offers.

(Source: Scribe)

Keep Up the Hard Work

Publishing your startup’s website is only the beginning! Now, you’ve got to drive people to your site. Whether that’s through marketing your webpage on social media, or finetuning your SEO strategy (ideally, you’ll do both!), it’s crucial that you maintain your business’ website. Keep up the hard work, and you’re sure to see results!