Steps to Prepare for Your Small Business Website

Ready to get going on your shiny new business website? Excellent! Here are the general steps to prepare for your small business website presence. Note this list assumes you’ve already figured your USP (unique selling proposition) and are now ready to shout it out to the world.

1. Figure out your domain name
2. Create a list of pages (or sections) for website. This may include:
   • Your home page (of course)
   • Either an overview page or a page for each of your service offerings
   • An about page detailing who you are, and more importantly why you’re the perfect company to fulfill their needs. What is your marketplace advantage? Your unique service offering? Some good thoughts on this from Shopify and writing your own about page.
   • A gallery page if you have enough photos or videos.
   • Contact page and/or request a quote page if you want to have customers request quotes from the website. Consider Gravity forms for advanced features here.
   • Do you want customers to come to your location? If so, a directions page.
3. Write text copy for the above list of pages including copy for the about page, services etc. New to writing for the web? You should absolutely consider hiring a professional writer. At minimum, check out this great article on writing for the web to help you get the hang of it.
4. Round up available photography and/or videos. We’ve all seen enough stock photos, right?
5. Review your logo design. Looking for dozens of logo design options specific to your brand? If you have $300 to $500, 99Designs will get you a clean, credible logo design.
6. Grab your colors and any brand guidelines you may have available.
7. The address, email address and phone number to be used on the website.
8. A list of your social media profile urls.
9. List your client testimonials you may have available.
10. Consider writing a description of your perfect customer help inform your design and content decisions. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole here search “buyer persona” on Google.
11. A list of sites like you like either because their content or their design
12. Review the sites of your main competitors
13. If possible, answer how you’re going to get traffic to the website. Is SEO important? If so what are keywords that you want the site to be found for.
14. What’s your time frame?
15. What’s your budget for the website?