Things to Consider Before Starting a Business Website

Starting a business website is one of the best decisions you can make. As it allows you to put your business in front of more people. But before you rush off and pay hundreds or thousands of dollars on a site there are a few things you should be aware of. These are hosting, site layout, security, search engine optimization and lead generation.

1. Hosting
When looking at hosting packages there are three main things to consider the type of web hosting, disk space and bandwidth. The two types of web hosting available are Linux and Windows though the difference between them is minimal. So unless your site needs a particular language or script to run it doesn’t matter which you choose. More import is the amount of disk space as that is where your site is stored. If you have a big site with many images and pages then you’ll need more space than a site with no images and just a few pages. But probably the most important thing about hosting is bandwidth. As every time a visitor comes to your site they use bandwidth and if your site runs out then it won’t be displayed. All your potential customer will see is an out of bandwidth message and what sort of impression will that leave.

2. Site Layout
There are so many cool things you can do with your site such as using images for links. But these are all useless unless visitors to your site can find what they want. So instead of loading your site with images which take ages to load and other bells and whistles remember simple is best. When you first create your site try and limit the number of images per page as that will make them load faster and use text links. Of course you can always tweak it later on.

3. Security
Just as offline you protect your business premise’s you have to do the same with your website. Now it’s impossible to make a site completely secure but there are a number of things you can do to make it harder to hack. The first thing you should do is make sure any passwords are a mixture of capital and lowercase letters along with numbers and punctuation marks. So something like Go7&trdAf. If you are looking after the site yourself then you also need to make sure your computer is protected from spyware and the anti virus is up to date. As one of the main ways people get into sites is by installing what’s know as keylogers on your computer. These record all your keystrokes and send them to the hacker. You also want to regularly backup your site so if anything does go wrong you can restore it with minimum hassle.

4. Optimization
This is probably the most important thing to consider before starting a business website. As if you get this wrong not only won’t you get any potential customers visiting your site but you will also have wasted any money you spent getting your site created. The first thing you need to do is choose a domain name usually this will be your companies name as you’ll want to brand your business. Though this will make it harder to get your site ranked for terms your customers are searching for. But there’s nothing stopping you from creating another site which focuses on one highly searched term and directing the traffic to your main site.

5. Lead Generation
The fact is that most people who visit your site won’t purchase anything so you need a way of staying in touch with them. An easy way of doing this is having a form on your site which allows people to sign up for your mailing list. Though you want to make sure that it’s visible otherwise it will go unnoticed.

There are many things to bare in mind when starting a business website. By dealing with them before you actually build the site not only will you end up with a better site but you won’t have to make costly changes later on.