An online presence is essential to making your business look professional. Even if you do not require a website, you should at the very least have a proper domain to have your contact email looking legit. No one will trust that you have had years of experience when your business card shows legitbusiness@gmail.com (just an example, I have nothing against Google, in fact, we will be using their email service later on). It is more trustworthy to have contact@legitbusiness.com as your email.
A few examples of businesses that would really benefit from having a website are :
- Online Shop – With shopping cart, credit card acceptance, etc.
- Construction companies to have a record of their previous projects.
- Student body that would benefit from having a permanent page of their previous projects and initiatives, to display to sponsors.
However, there are certain businesses or organisations that would be better off with having a Facebook page or Instagram account instead of a website, as it is best to have regular updates and clients are able to leave reviews on your Facebook page. Examples are :
- Sports / fitness coaching
- Automotive workshops / garages / detailing
- Wedding photography / freelance photographer
- Interior design / Renovation works
Knowing your purpose for a website is important as you might need to hire a professional website designer instead of trying to set one up yourself. A simple portfolio website is easy enough to set up with a little bit of learning.
There’s basically 3 parts to setting up a website:
1) Having a website address, called a Domain (legitbusiness.com)
2) Having a storage server (Hosting).
3) Setting up your Email (contact@legitbusiness.com).
1) Domain :
The website address that points to your website (sometimes called URL). From here on we’ll assume your company is named ” Legit Business Company ” and your website is legitbusiness.com. Quick fact: you don’t need to key in the “www” in most website addresses. Once you buy the domain legitbusiness.com, you can (at no cost, for free) create additional domains like shop.legitbusiness.com for your online shop, for example.
This is also useful if you bought your own personal domain like myname.com and have small projects like a food blog at foodreview.myname.com and also a personal blog at blog.myname.com. Do note that you could also place the variations behind to make them myname.com/blog and myname.com/foodreview.
2) Hosting :
You can skip this part if you intend to just have 1 website that I help to set up.
The webpages of your website are stored as files, in an online server. Basically like a computer hard drive, but online. Remember that Windows have “File Explorer” and “Internet Explorer”? Similar to browsing the files on your computer, Internet Explorer browses files on computer servers on the internet.
These files are (most often) transferable, thus if you decide to migrate to another host, you can copy these files (your website) and you should still see the same website. This is important as your website grows and you need to move to a larger website or one that provides a better and cheaper deal. On this subject, some websites that “lets you build a website easily” sometimes claims the rights to your website and domain address, thus not letting you change to other webhosting providers. You should avoid these sites in my opinion, but there’s some pros to using them, to be fair.
3) Email :
Head over HERE for the guide for setting up your email.
Note: I’m phrasing these explanations in simple basic terms for better understanding and in a way more relevant to my approach. I shall not be responsible for any inaccuracies or wrong use of terms and analogies in this website should anyone takes it out of context.