As a new business owner, you are probably being told that it is important to create a website. But you are more interested in getting investors, developing your technology and not really looking for customers and sales right now. So why should you spend money and effort on creating a website? And if you do decide to create this website, how much effort should you put into it?
In this blogpost I’ll explain why it is almost always a good idea to create a website for your new company and share some guidelines for what I consider the minimum, you should do. Even though you are likely outsourcing the website creation and maintenance to someone else, I recommend you familiarize yourself with the key terms described in this blog. In this manner, you will be better equipped to supervise the process and get a nice and future proof website with-out too many expensive surprises.
I’ll share 10 steps required to set up a website and provide some hints on the way on how to implement the different steps. I am going to share some personal recommendations for various tools to use. Please note, that I am not affiliated nor being paid by any of the companies mentioned and, the recommendations are just based on my personal experience.
A final note before we start: This blog is not a guide to WordPress or any of the tools I mention along the way. There are excellent guides available on-line and I suggest you check them out if you want to dive deeper into the technical details.
Why do I need a website?
I often get this question from founders of a start-up: Why do I need a website right now? Maybe you are developing a new technology which is years away from becoming a sellable product. The concerns are often that telling the world about the product too soon will disappoint the prospects and – worst case – let your competitors know all your secrets.
I will argue that you almost always need a basic, reasonable professional looking website with a few fundamental pages. The two main reasones are
- investors expect a website
- building a brand on-line takes years
- job seekers expect a website
Investors will expect a website where they can read about your company and your team before engaging. It is a kind of check-mark that needs to be crossed but, of course, not the only one.
Before you can start selling your product the potential customers need to know about you and what your brand stands for. It surprises many new business owners of high tech products that the product doesn’t just sell itself and, that often it takes years to build a brand and start seeing revenue. Your website is a platform you can use to build your brand and start creating trust among your future customers. Also, sales cycles in Business-to-Business (B2B) are normally long – anywhere from months to years. So, this is another good reason to start engaging with your prospects as early as possible.
Your website should reflect the vision you have for your company. For instance, if you are building a company offerings elegant industrial design services, your website should have a cool and beautiful lay-out. If your website aren’t elegantly made, how can your future investors and customers trust that your services will be. If you are developing an advanced high tech product, your website should include information about your technology to justify that you are an indeed an expert in the field. Nobody wants to buy high tech from someone that doesn’t not know what they are doing.
And finally, if you are going to attract and hire new employees, they expect to read about your company to evaluate if they want to work for you. The best candidates can likely choose between several companies so, it is important that your company stands out.
Should I out-source or do it myself?
As a business owner or executive, creating a website is likely not your number one priority, and it shouldn’t be. Therefore, the best option for you is to out-source the website creation. However, I do recommend that you ensure that the website is created on a platform that is as flexible as possible to be future safe. It should be easy to maintain, edit and add functionality to the website. Also, you should be free to move the website from one hosting platform to another and from one web-developer to another.
Once the basic website is created it is important to have a plan for how you perform day-to-day edits and maintenance on the website. It is common for smaller companies to hire a part time marketing professional (or a student) to handle this. Alternatively, you can engage a specialist website contractor like Websitecare to do this for you.
Which platform should I use?
A website is basically just a bunch of documents written in the programming language HTML. These documents have to be stored (hosted) on a server that can be accessed by anyone from an internet connection anywhere in the world.
Content Management System
The HTML website documents are created using a so-called Content Management System (CMS). There are several options but, my recommendation is to go with WordPress because of the following
- It is the most used CMS in the world (more than 60% of all websites are build using WordPress).
- The basic functionality (which is quite extensive) is free
- There are numerous so-called plugins (some free and some paid) for adding almost any specific functionality you can think of to you website (like a webshop, booking system or document control system).
- Because of the popularity, it is easy to find someone with experience in WordPress to help you edit and maintain the website. Likewise, there are tons of free support information available online.
- WordPress is not bound to your hosting, so you can always move your website from one hosting company to another.
WordPress is fairly simple to use but – in all fairness – there are simpler systems. Some of the hosting companies offer their own website builder which is often very intuitive and simple to use. However, the (free) functionality is generally quite limited so, it quickly becomes expensive or even impossible to add more advanced features or personalized design to your website. Also, you are bound to the hosting company and likely have to rewrite the whole website if you decide to move the site to a different hosting company. Finally, it can be hard to find experts in a specific website builder outside the hosting company.
Hosting
In terms of hosting there are several reasonably priced options. I recommend using a trusted company that offers good and high performance. Also, I would go for a solution offering free 1-click-installation of WordPress and easy installation of a SSL certificate. Personally, I use Simply.com which has worked fine for me for years.
Which pages should I create?
It can be hard to know what type of content to focus on in your website and how many pages to create. For a high-tech start-up the boxes on the figure below represent the 7 web pages that is generally agreed that any new website should have as a minimum. It also displays the navigation structure with 5 main pages, a single childpage (Jobs) and a page with your privacy policy.
The general structure of every page typically consists of a header section with your logo, company name and a navigation menu, a middle section with the page specific content and a footer section with your company contact information and links to you social media pages.
In the following I will briefly describe what type of content should go in the middle section on each page.
Home
The home page is the front page of your company and generally the first page a new visitor sees. The home page should clearly state what you do, what problem you are solving and who your target customers are. And all of this in a brief headline followed by a few sentences and a relevant image. This helps visitors quickly determine if what you offer fits with their needs. Think of this as your “elevator pitch”: the 30 second talk that you should be prepared to give to anyone to explain what your company is all about.
The home page should also include an area with pictures and quick links to your product(s).
Finally, the home page should include an area that invites the visitor to learn more about the company.
Products
The products page should include the following for all products you offer (or plan to offer):
- Picture of the product
- 2 – 4 key features
- 2 – 4 key benefits (unique selling points)
- A brief description of the product
- A description of application areas of the product
- A clearly visible call-to-action button that invites the customer to contact you
If you offer a few related products, I recommend placing them on the same page since visitors are accustomed to scrolling down a page. In case you have a lot of products or products that serve completely different purposes, you should consider categorizing the products and creating multiple category and product pages.
Technology
This is a special page that is typical for companies selling technically advanced solutions. The technology page should describe your technology and why is it superior to competing technologies.
The technology page can also be used to explain some of the applications of your product.
About us
The About us page should contain the following sections:
- Vision and mission – basically a bit longer description of vision and mission of your company than the headline on the front page
- History – the background and history of your company. This can for instance help investors to realize that your company is founded on a solid background of years of research.
- Team – pictures and brief profiles of management and board of directors. For small companies you can include the entire team.
- Link to job posting page.
Jobs
Even if you do not have any open position I still recommend that you create a jobs page where you encourage potential candidates to apply unsolicited.
Contact us
The contact us page should as a minimum include your company contact information (adress, phone number and email) and a contact form. The fields in the contact form should at least ask for name, company and email.
Privacy policy
One of the mandatory pages you have to create is a privacy policy page describing how you handle personal data from your website visitors. At least you are going to have a form on your website that visitors can fill out with their contact data so, you have to describe how you handle this contact data. ‘
You can generate the policy page from on-line templates or get inspired for companies similar to your company.
10 steps to a new website
The following description is a high-level listing of the 10 steps you have to go through to create a functional website.
1) Buy a domain
The first thing to do it to buy a domain name like “mycompany.com”. This is the text you will see in all your website links (called urls = Uniform Resource Locators). Make sure to buy the domain from a trusted source such as Dandomain.dk (in Denmark) or directly from your hosting company. Note, that the domain has to be renewed for a fee every year.
2) Buy a hosting
Once you have a domain name you should buy a hosting service where your website will be stored. Find a company with a good customer rating which offers high performance and good support. As mentioned earlier, I use Simply.com but you can also ask friends and business partners for recommendations.
3) Install WordPress
I strongly recommend hosting your website with a company that offers 1-click-installation of WordPress as this makes the installation extremely easy.
4) Install a Theme / Builder
The lay-out of your website (fonts, colors, headings, navigation menus, etc) is determined by the so-called Theme you use. There a many free themes to choose from and it can be quite fast an easy to get a good looking website created using a standard theme. However, a theme often limits your design options.
If you want more control over the exact lay-out of your website you can install a so-called Builder. A Builder lets you overwrite your theme design and controls the design elements of your website. The most popular builder at the moment seems to be Elementor which can be downloaded as a free plugin to WordPress with basic functionality. More advanced features requires a paid version. Other popular builders are WPBakery and Divi.
If you are going to build a webshop (using the free WordPress plugin Woocommerce), I strongly recommend choosing a theme that is specifically made for webshops. I have found that some themes and builders will not come with all the functionality you expect from a webshop (like “view cart” buttons etc). I use the paid version of the Shopisle theme for my webshop Great Fun Arts and this has worked hassle free for years.
5) Get a SSL certificate
When someone visits your website, their browser (Edge, Chrome, Safari, etc) reads information from the website. This communication channel should be SSL encrypted to ensure safe exchange of information. In your browser you see the SSL encryption as a closed keylock in the upper left corner next to your domain name.
This is an important step as search engines like Google will not rank nor display pages that are not SSL-encrypted.
You need to acquire a SSL-certificate and install it at your website. Often, your hosting company will offer an easy and even free method to do this.
6) Set-up cookie consent
Cookies are small pieces of code that is us to personalize a user’s web browsing. In the Eupean Union you have to ask for a user’s consent before installing cookies in his/hers browser. There exists a lot cookie consent plugins for WordPress and many of the tools lets you test compliance with the EU GDPR directive. Personally, I use Cookie-script.
7) Create privacy policy
As written earlier, you have to have this page and you can find templates and inspiration on-line.
8) Create content for basic pages
So far, we have mostly installed stuff and prepared for the website. But, now you are ready to start creating the first 6 pages as decribed above.
A theme will often come with stock photos for banners and featured images that you want to exchange with your own photos relevant for your business.
Once you have created the home page you need to tell WordPress to use that page as the static front page.
9) Create lay-out
With the basic content in place we are ready to style the pages.
Even if you have chosen to use a theme with predetermined fonts og page lay-outs you should still add at least the following:
- your logo in the header
- A web icon (the one that is shown in web browsers)
- Colors (in header and/or footer) that match your company identity
Also, you want to create a menu which enables easy navigation to the new pages.
10) Install forms plugin
To enable potential new customers, investors, employees and other business partners to contact you, you need a contact form. Again, there are many plugins available for WordPress. A god place to start is the WPForms-lite which is free.
So what about SEO and Google Analytics?
When your website is live you may want to see how the page is doing. How many visitors do you get every day and which pages are they looking at? The typical tool used for this is Google Analytics (or Google Analytics 4 actually). However, in some EU countries (including Denmark) it has become a bit more complex to use Google Analytics because you have to ensure that the personal data (like IP-address) of you visitors do not leave the EU. Since Google’s servers can be located in the US this is a problem you need to take care of. Methods do exist however, I personally find it simpler to use the free WordPress plugin Matomo, which provides lots of information about your website traffic and is compliant with EU-laws.
Another topic you may hear about is SEO – Search Engine Optimization. The purpose of SEO is to help your webpages to be shown as one of the first results in a relevant Google search. The most important guideline here is to write content that is relevant to your target audience. However, it can help to do some on-line research to investigate what keywords people typically search for and include those keywords on your webpages.