A website is important for any business because it helps to link the business owners to their clients wherever they are around the world. When you don’t have a website, you run the risk of not being able to communicate with the consumers despite them knowing about your business and what you can offer. This can be very dangerous because it might cause you to lose very many potential clients that would have helped you increase your profits. When starting a business, a website is one of the most crucial things that you need to set up. It works as a means of advertisement to your clients as well because they can see what you are about. This aspect is beneficial in the beginning stages because you may not have a large budget for advertisement yet. Since a website is important for any business, it needs to be set up with a lot of care so that it can be effective. A bad website can actually discourage clients from seeking your services. Therefore, when setting up your website, below are some points you need to consider:

1. Clear goals

Before setting up the website, you need to ask yourself what you want the website to depict about you and your company. You need to establish the goals and objectives as early as possible. You don’t have to do this alone. In fact, you can involve some of the senior executives of your company together with a few employees from the IT department. This is so that they can help you come up with ideas that will benefit the company. Some of the questions that you can ask yourselves include: Why are you building the website? What do you want to put on the website? How do you plan to maintain the website? What do you want to get from the website? After all these questions are answered, you also need to establish each role everyone will play in the building of the website. These guidelines will help you to have a clear goal in mind that you want to achieve.

2. Content of the website

When setting the objectives of the website, one of the points of consideration should be the content of the website. This aspect is very vital because it helps you as a company knows what you want your clients to see and read about you on your website. It also helps the person creating the website to know how many pages the website needs to have. Most websites tend to have several pages including Home, About Us, Services and Products, Contacts and a FAQ page. The latter is for frequently asked questions that the clients may have, and their answers. It is very helpful as it gives the clients the extra information they may need immediately without having to wait for your response later on. Another page that has become quite common nowadays is the Testimonials page. This one just contains all the positive feedback from previous clients that you have dealt with in the past. This page helps to build the confidence of potential clients in your prowess at providing the services and products that they need. You can also add a Review section in your website for clients to post what they think. If you do so, be prepared to get some negative comments as well.

3. Cost of operations

Unless you have a server on which you can host your website for free, you need to pay another company to host it for you. In most cases, these costs are paid annually to renew your subscription. If you fail to make the payments on time, they may end up selling your domain to somebody else. Therefore, if you are being hosted by a third party company, make sure that you make arrangements to have your payment done on time. Furthermore, as your business grows, you may have the need to upgrade your website to suit your growing needs. You may need someone to constantly upload information onto your website as need be, for example, when it comes to testimonials or pictures. If you have an in-house team, well and good. If not, you may need to pay them separately.

4. Responsiveness

When building a website, responsiveness is key. Here, responsiveness refers to the ability to access the same website across all devices; whether on a smartphone or a laptop, or even a computer. This design is the best because it saves you the cost of having two websites: one for the computer and one for the smartphone. It also saves the client time when they want to go to your website on any device. They don’t have to go to different sites depending on the device they are using. Therefore, when setting up a website, consider the benefits of getting one that is responsive.