Beginners Guide: Building a Good Website

A website is your office on the Internet. We invest lacs of rupees doing up our physical offices to impress visitors and customers. For our digital visitors and customers, our website Is our office on the Internet. Thus is very important that you have a good and decent website.

If you don’t have a good website, it is not going to serve any purpose doing any kind of digital marketing activity. When you guide the digital traffic to your website, you will end up losing potential customers, if the website not done well.

Here some tips to keep in mind while creating your website

Domain Name

The very first thing you will need is a domain name i.e. your website address. People will use your web address to find you on the internet. The domain should be relatable to your business or the brand. Make sure the name is easy to remember.

Don’t have domain names that are too long or difficult to spell. You can buy domain names from domain name registries (like godaddy.com or bigrock.com).  The .com extension continues to be the most popular domain name extension for businesses.

A lot of businesses in India now also use the .in extension. Domain names are generally not very expensive (unless it a very commonly used term) and therefore it may be a good idea to buy both the .com and .in domain name. Your website can reside on one of them and the other can just redirect traffic to the other domain name. I don’t recommend going for the fancier domain names like .io or .biz etc.

Webhosting

Web hosting is the place where you store your website - your files, content, images, videos, databases, etc. When deciding on a web hosting platform, always go with reputed ones. Again your domain name provider would generally also be providing web hosting services.

Depending on your budget, select a hosting package that best suits your requirements. As your business grows, you can then think of upgrading to a higher package or migrating to a new Webhosting platform.

Content Management System (CMS)

A content management system (CMS) is a software application that is used to manage the creation and modification of digital content on a website. If you are a beginner, select a CMS platform that doesn’t need you to have the technical knowledge to manage it.

A good CMS makes creating and updating a website content much easier and saves you lots of time. Wordpress is a recommended CMS platform if your website is not running any applications (like a booking engine) or does need to display different content to different consumers basis their geography or previous browsing or buying history.

35% of the website of the world are built on Wordpress. Wordpress has both a free version and if you want some fancier website layouts a paid version.

Ease of Navigation

Navigation Menu is like the roadmap of your website.  Lesser the time it takes for a visitor to find what they are looking for, lesser will be the bounce rate for your website. If you don’t have too much content to populate on your website, the modern trends are to have a single page website, with a long scroll where all content resides on a single page.

However single page websites are at a disadvantage when it comes to SEO since you have the only page to do your SEO tagging. If you are planning a large website with lots of content and information, it is good to have an upfront mega-menu, where at-a-click the user can find the specific information that he is looking for.

Content Planning

Visitors come on your website looking for information. Besides providing information about your company, its products and services, it is also good to have some interesting content on the website that keeps the visitors engaged on the website.

Unlike the print or TV world, where you can force someone to watch your brand message, you can’t do that on the internet. Thus the way to get someone to think about your brand is to create interesting content (thought leadership content, videos, downloadable PDFs etc), that allows the visitor to engage with the content.  The website needs to be aesthetically appealing with a judicious mix of text, pictures and videos.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Google is the big daddy of the Internet. If someone goes to Google and types in the search box, products and services that you offer, you would want your website to show up. And the way to do this is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO is a science whereby you embed certain tags in your websites code which tells Google what your website is all about, and helps Google index your website on relevant keywords, thereby increasing the chance of your website showing up on Google search.

Website Analytics

Set up Google Analytics and review it regularly to see from where visitors are coming, what are they doing on your website, which the last page they view before exiting, etc. This data will help you to optimize your website better in terms of what is working and what needs to be changed.

Data Collection

Don’t let the visitors just become stats in your web analytics. These are your future prospects. Set up a mechanism to collect emails of you, visitors, through forms, email subscription, etc.

By Hareesh Tibrewala, Joint CEO of Mirum India