Advice for modern businesses – How to build your own website

For modern businesses of all sizes, having a website is becoming as essential as having a phone number. Looked at from another perspective, the easier it is for consumers to contact your company, the more likely they are to do business with you. One of the benefits of e-mail is that it means that consumers can send non-urgent communications when it is convenient for them to do so and pick up the response in another quiet moment. This means that having an e-mail address is hugely beneficial to most businesses and while it is, of course, possible to use a free e-mail address (although some of the providers explicitly forbid their addresses for being used for business purposes, even though the rule is, at best, often loosely enforced if at all), it looks vastly more professional to have a dedicated domain with its own e-mail addresses. It also gives you another communications channel with your customer.

When thinking about how to make your own website the first step is to think about how you want to use it. While the internet is obviously a great sales channel, there are plenty of websites which are purely used to inform and/or to entertain and quite a few of them are owned by businesses. If you do have serious plans to use your website as a sales channel then you will need to support at least one payment method. Ideally you should be able to offer consumers a choice since the easier you make it for them to pay, the more likely you make it that they will complete a purchase, rather than abandoning their basket in frustration. While some payment methods such as Paypal and Google checkout can be used by anyone and integrated into any website, if you wish to accept payment cards (such as Visa and Mastercard) directly, then you will need to work with a Payment Scheme Processor (PSP). It’s a good idea to find your PSP before you start building your website because then you build it from the ground up to be 100% compatible with their services. This is usually very straightforward and many PSPs can offer a lot of help to new entrepreneurs.

With regards to building the rest of the website, the key point to remember is that content is far more important than state-of-the-art design. While big companies with big budgets can create visually stunning websites with dynamic special effects, the fact is that these typically only hold a visitor’s attention for a short period. Content is what engages them and it’s also what keeps a site at the top of the search engine rankings. It’s also important to note that it is a legal requirement to take all reasonable steps to make websites accessible to people with disabilities. It is also a matter of sound business sense to make your website accessible to as many people as possible. For practical purposes, this means using clear fonts and standard writing style. In other words, use upper and lower cases and punctuation as they typically used in standard writing. There should be a clear level of contrast between text and background and it’s worth remembering that red/green colour blindness is relatively common so if you’re looking to use contrasting colours to make a point, it’s best to avoid those two as colour-blind people can be confused. Similarly menu headings and control buttons should be big enough to be clicked on easily, even by people with poor co-ordination.

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