Building your First Website

You know you need a website for your new business, but you’ve been putting it off because the task seems overwhelming or intimidating.

Here's a short primer on what you need to know about building a website, along with the resources for getting started.

Two basic types of websites apply to most new or small businesses: informational and e-commerce. An informational website serves as a marketing tool to help build awareness about your products, services and company. An e-commerce site will enable you to sell your products or services directly from your website and accept credit card or other payments online.

Informational websites are relatively easy to get up and running. E-commerce sites are a bit more complex.

Before you do anything, think about what you want your website to accomplish. Do you want something relatively simple that customers can access for information on your products? Or do you envision something more sophisticated, with e-commerce, bulletin boards, blogs or other features? Once you narrow your focus, you can decide whether you want to tackle the project yourself or hire a professional to coordinate the tasks for you. Generally speaking, these tasks include domain name registration, website design, website hosting, search engine optimization and e-commerce enablement, all of which are summarized here. I've included a few sites to help you get started.

Creating the look and feel of your website: If you feel comfortable with technology or want to begin with a simple site, there are plenty of software programs to help you do it yourself, including Adobe Dreamweaver. For a list with reviews, visit ConsumerSearch.com and look under "software reviews." Building your own site can be time-consuming, but the programs will walk you through the process and are appropriate for beginners to more advanced users.

Remember, a poorly designed website is worse than no website at all because it can turn interested customers away. Your information should be concise, meaningful and informative; your photos and graphics should be clear and professional; and your colors and design should be reader-friendly and attractive. In addition, the pages should be easy to navigate. If you're offering e-commerce, provide customers with an easy, efficient process to purchase your products, so they don’t get frustrated and go away.

Providing a web address for your site: You can register your own domain name whether or not you hire a professional design firm. In fact, you can do it right now. Registration is relatively inexpensive and allows you to claim an address for yourself before someone else registers it. Many web hosting providers offer this service as part of their package. To find out whether your desired address is available or to register a domain name, try sites such as MyDomain.com, 1and1.com and GoDaddy.com.

Giving people access to your website: You'll need to find a host for your website so anyone browsing the net can find it. Hosting services start at about $4 per month and climb from there, depending on traffic volume (number of visitors and amount of bandwidth) and the services you add. To find a provider, check out WHReviews.com, BestWebHosting2008.com and Hosting-Review.com.

You'll find that many companies offer all or most of the tools and functions you need as bundles or as a-la-carte, add-on features. These can include hosting, design, drag-and-drop templates, domain name registration, e-commerce and e-mail.

Ensuring that browsers can find your site through search engines: Once your site is designed and online, the key is getting customers to find it. Simply launching it on the web doesn’t mean they’ll see it; you need to ensure that it comes up when people search for key terms associated with your product, service or company. This is often referred to as search engine optimization or SEO. To do this, you’ll need to submit your website to popular search engines such as Google. For a comprehensive list, visit SearchEngineWatch.com. You should also ensure that your website’s copy includes plenty of key terms in your headlines and subheads directly related to your business.

Enabling e-commerce: You'll need additional information if you want to enable e-commerce on your site. If you need a website solely to sell online, the easiest and probably fastest approach is to create a store account with an online auction site such as eBay, Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

However, assuming you want your own e-commerce store and platform, you'll need to establish a merchant account. This will allow you to receive payments via credit card by processing payments with your bank. In addition to your own bank or financial institution, many companies offer merchant account services. For a list and reviews, visit MerchantAccountForum.com. Fees can vary greatly, so shop around before deciding on a provider.

Once you have set up your merchant account, you'll also need a "gateway" service that allows consumers to enter their personal information and credit card information online, such as Authorize.net, VeriSign.com and IntelliPay.com. These companies function as a bridge between your business and the credit card and electronic check-payment processing networks, to provide secure passage of payment data to the appropriate credit card processors.

QuickBooks' Merchant Services provides similar services, with the advantage of enabling automatic entry of credit card payments into your QuickBooks Financial software program, eliminating double entry of financial data.

Add a shopping cart: The last step in the e-commerce process is to add a shopping cart to your website. This is the button your customers click on to tally the items they plan to purchase and proceed to checkout, where they provide their credit card information. Click here to read reviews of the various kinds of shopping cart software.

If you're overwhelmed, you'll be happy to know that many of the services mentioned in this article are provided by all-in-one service companies--often for one monthly package price--through one source such as Web.com or CityMax.com.

However, it can also be well worth your time to outsource the task, especially if you anticipate heavy e-commerce or a more complex, customized website design from the start. In that case, plan to work closely with the design firm to ensure that your overall goals are accomplished on time and within budget, and that it truly understands your vision and intentions for the site. A plethora of web designers and design firms can be found by searching Google, Craigslist, or even your local chamber of commerce or phone book.