Build Your Business Reputation
No matter the size, type or location of your new business, having a website that best represents your company is of the utmost importance. Your website signifies who you are as a business and fortifies the persona that you want to build with your potential customers. Let’s talk about some of the things to think about to get your business website up and running.
Building a Professional Foundation
As a new business that is starting up, you are likely entering a field that has competitors that have been around for a while and have built a reputation. Building your own reputation is a long process, and it starts with how many people are going to initially see or find your business – your website. Your website is your introduction to potential clients and customers, so you need to represent yourself in the best way possible.
What this means is that your business site needs to be clean, modern, well-designed and responsive. If people are coming to your site to learn about you and your site looks outdated or doesn’t look good on their phone (which a majority of your users will be viewing on) they are going to close your site and move on to a more reputable competitor. Make your website shine!
Hire a Designer or Build Yourself
There are many options for do-it-yourself website builders that claim to be cheap and easy. But don’t fool yourself – these builders like Wix and Squarespace are still going to take you a ton of time to figure out the in’s and outs, and won’t let you modify and customize your site as you want. Remember, you need your site to look professional as a new business so you can start building your reputation.
While you can go the DIY route, there is a good chance when people visit your site they are going to be able to tell that you built it yourself. If the formatting is a bit off, or if you get the classic “Built with Squarespace” footer, it is going to present a lack of professionalism right of start line.
There are also a lot of other elements that are involved when building your own website, like configuring your domain, making sure you have a secure connection (HTTPS) and email server settings. These things can be simple items, but end up taking up a lot of your time if you are doing it for the first time.
For those reason’s I highly recommend hiring a professional developer to build your site.
Who To Hire
Often one of the barriers people face when trying to find someone to build them a website is the huge amount of people offering website services, as well as the huge amount of scams and bad actors out there.
For these reasons, I recommend sticking with local website design companies to build your new business site. They are much easier to vet, they often post their portfolio of other local businesses they work with, and they won’t disappear into the ether in the middle of a project. For example, I’ve used Van Island Web when I needed web design in Victoria BC, my local area, and have found great success with them. It’s always helpful to discuss the website project in-person, when you can. Don’t discount the important of customer service and fit when working with a web design company!
Important Information To Publish
What do you need to include when building your business website. Working with a professional web designer can help when planning and creating content, but you want to keep your site straight-forward and easy to read. You don’t want important content buried within a pile of links.
Some of the key information you want to include:
- A concise description of the services you offer.
- An overview of your company – if you are trying to build your reputation, you need to provide potential clients/customers background information about you and the business.
- Contact information – you need to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to contact you so make sure this information is found in multiple spots.
- Success stories or examples of work – again, you are trying to build a reputation, so show off the great work that you have done.
- REAL testimonials – people can tell when testimonials are fake, so find some of your previous clients (even if it’s just one or two) and get actual testimonials. Authenticity comes through in items like this, and authenticity helps build reputation.
There may be other content you want to include on your site, but remember that you want your site easy to navigate, and for the important information to be easily accessible.
Keeping Your Site Accurate and Up-To-Date
Many people setting up their new business website think that once it’s built, their website is done and they never have to think about it again. This, unfortunately, is incorrect. The fastest way to lose credibility and reputation is having incorrect information on your site or having your site look out of date.
If you are making blog posts on your site, make sure that the last one isn’t from a year ago. If you have social media streams embedded on your site, make sure that your last social media post is someone recent.
A business website that looks abandoned is not a great way to build your reputation and legitimacy.
Building Your Whole Online Persona
These days, it takes a bit more then a website to build your online reputation as a business. You website is definitely the foundation, but you need to build out other profiles and connect it all together as well for your potential see you as a reputable company.
Google Business Profile/Bing Places
This is a no brainer to help build your business reputation and link to your new website. By claiming your Google My Business profile, you can start to show up in Google’s Map packages and further assert that you a real business. It helps to have a real business address for this, but you can also build out these profiles for service areas as well.
Social Media
In this day and age, it’s a bit of a no-brainer to connect social media profiles to your business and it’s website. Make sure you create profiles on the major players (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X/Twitter) and link them back to your new website. You don’t have to be overly active on all of the platforms (maybe a post or 2 on each) but having these profiles builds your online footprint, which again helps build your business reputation.
Professionalism is Key
As you can see, making your business stand out and look professional is one of the main goals for building out your company website. When basic sloppy and poorly designed websites are a dime a dozen, you need to stand out from the crowd with a website that looks great, runs great, and defines who you are. You don’t need to spend a fortune on this, but you’ll definitely have to spend a bit of money to make sure your site is professional and makes a great first impression.