The Ultimate Guide to Building Your First Startup Website
Finally, you’re ready to launch your startup. But you have one more thing left on the “how to launch a startup successfully” list—a professional website. You landed this blog using the keywords “how to build a startup website,” and that’s exactly what this blog will show you.
Read on for the best startup website guide you can get.
In today’s age, having a strong online presence is essential for every business, particularly new businesses. A website for your startup meets one of the requirements for an online presence.
What is a website? A website is basically the digital storefront of your business. Rather than the traditional brick-and-mortar store, a website serves as an extension of your brand. The benefits of a startup website cannot be overemphasised, as it can be the deciding factor between gaining or losing customers.
A well-designed website draws passersby—on search engines, of course—and gives your business the best first impression ever. That’s one thing you mustn’t overlook as a startup. Besides a perfect design layout, there are other things you must do to stand out—SEO. Search engine optimisation is that final trick that pushes your website to the right audience.
Here’s How To Create a Startup Website
Define your purpose and audience
The first thing on the list is to know your startup from the inside to the outside. There’s very little progress you could make if you didn’t know what you represent as a business. Want to write a pitch deck to seal deals? Want to write an investor-ready business plan? You need to define your business.
Here’s how to define your purpose-start from the very beginning. What problem does your startup solve? That’s its purpose. What about it’s audience? Your target audience is the group of people most likely to use your products or services. They are the people who’s painpoint your business aims to resolve.
Once you’ve identified your target audience and purpose, designing a website becomes easier. You’ll simply design a website and fill it with content solely for their benefit. For clarity, use the questions in the outline below:
Define your company’s mission: its standard that every company has its own mission statement; yours shouldn’t be different. So, define what yours is.
Know your target market: who needs your product? Where are they? What’s their social status? At this point, you’ll need a buyer persona.
A buyer persona is a carefully created profile of your ideal client. It helps you piece together the tiny details of your target audience. With a well-constructed buyer persona, you can improve your marketing strategy with personalised marketing campaigns.
Define your unique selling proposition: pinpoint what makes your brand unique. If you were the client, what would attract you the most about the company? Figuring out this will help you with the website’s layout.
Tip: Always keep your purpose simple. Too many words or points can muddle up the target’s mind. Also, keep your target audience straightforward—narrow it down.
Check out the competition
For every endeavour, the logical thing is to size up the competition. Honestly, entering a market without knowing the standard is like walking into a gangfight without a weapon.
The first step is to correctly identify your competition, emphasising ‘correctly’. As an example, if you’re a skincare brand for women, your competition isn’t another random skincare brand. You should dig deeper; check brands who are in the same niche as you. Also, their target audience matters. While some skincare brands cater to the elderly, others choose young women in their reproductive years. So, no need to start from scratch; just build on what they have going on.
Once you’ve identified the correct set of competitors, you can then scrutinise their website and get inspiration for your startup website. It doesn’t end there; visit their blogs, sign up for their email list (if they offer newsletters), and follow (or stalk) them on social media. That way, you get a first-row view of what they’re doing right or wrong.
Establish your website’s foundation
Like a building, creating a website for your startup requires the right foundation. Before you lay the actual building blocks, you’ll need the following for your website’s foundation:
A domain name: a string of characters that a user types to find your website—basically, it’s your website’s name. What the right domain name does is add credibility to your website and make your brand appear professional. So, you need to carefully pick one.
Although domain names are yours once you’ve paid (some are free), they’re not yours to keep indefinitely. They’re typically free for a year or two, after which a renewal occurs. Also, the provider can rightfully claim it back if you used it for illegal purposes-spamming, etc.
Need free domain names? Check out Freenom and Dot TK.
A hosting provider: web hosting providers give companies and individuals all they need to host and maintain a website. Think of it as business complex that gives your business the infrastructure, electricity, water, and even cleaner it needs. So, look out for a provider with fast loading speed, reliable uptime, and customer support. In addition, check for security and scalability.
A website builder is a tool that helps you build a website without the hassle of coding. You don’t even need external help since it’s made for novices.
Quicklaunch by TechDella is an affordable website builder. Quicklaunch offers you several templates, and it’s drag-and-drop feature makes it easy for you to customise your template to your taste. Its fast, easy, and affordable.
A sitemap: like it implies, this is simply a map of your website. For instance, when a client reaches the landing page and clicks on button A, where does it lead to? Button B: Does it lead to the consultation page or the products page?.
Creating a sitemap is relatively easy; start by listing out all the pages your website would contain. Then draw lines between them to show how users will move from one to another. Once you have a sitemap, you’re ready to design your website with Quicklaunch.
Design your website’s look and feel
Building a website isn’t complete without a user-friendly website layout. From the competitor analysis, you have an idea how your website should look. Here are some tips for building an attractive website.
Keep it simple: a busy website would only divert focus and turn the visitor away. So, minimalistic designs all the way
High-quality images: images have proven to be powerful way to communicate. So, create a good first impression with good images
Be consistent; inconsistence gives off screams, “Look at me; I’m naive.” So, maintain the same tone, style, colour scheme, and even font throughout the website.
Use great headlines: your headlines should be attention-grabbing (not extraggerated or misleading); that’s what draws people to the content of your website.
Use CTAs: call-to-actions, e.g., call now!, start my subscription, click here, etc., to trigger your audience to take decisions immediately. So, use them sufficiently.
Create high-quality content
Now that you’ve built your website, next comes traffic. For that, you need high-quality content.
When generating content, you should know that your content is an extension of the website. It has to maintain similar tone, style with the website and align with the business goals as well. The rule of thumb for website content is professional, informative, and engaging, so take note.
- Avoid errors in your website’s content by all means
- Keep it clear, concise and easy-to-read
- Enrich it with keywords (avoid keyword stuffing) to help it rank on search engines.
- Make it visually appealing with images, videos and other multimedia
Again, consistency plays an important role in creating a startup website. Make sure you publish new content regularly to improve your ranking on search engines and keep the traffic going. As you publish content, make sure you promote it on social media; it’s another way to boost visibility.
Promote your website
The emergence of the internet changed how businesses operate. In the past, businesses made use of print advertisements, television commercials, etc., to push themselves to their audiences. Now, the virtual world runs the show.
In present times, enterprises need a website as a contact point and digital workspace. Since you’ve successfully created and launched a startup website filled with valuable, informative content, it’s time to promote it through every channel possible.
There are several ways to do this, which include;
- social media marketing: almost everyone’s on social media, including your target audience. You can leverage social media to boost website traffic by sharing engaging contents and CTAs
- Email marketing: some think no one reads emails anymore; that’s false. A considerable number of people check their mails regularly. So, you should use newsletters, promotionals, etc. with clear CTAs to move attention to your website. Just make sure the emails are personalised and relevant to the recipient’s interest.
- Targeted ad campaigns: targeted ad campaigns are a sure way to reach the desired audience. You can use platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads to target certain demographics.
Just make the ad copy clear and compelling.
While all these sound easy, it can be time-consuming and stressful. That’s where marketing automation comes in.
Marketing automation is the use of software to simplify marketing tasks. With it, startups can eliminate repetitive tasks like social media posting and take on a more personalised approach to marketing. Marketing automation gets the job done faster and more efficiently.
Want to clear marketing off your table? Are you having trouble getting the desired marketing results? Let Techdella handle it all. Because we are a team of marketing experts, we give you marketing automation with the perfect human-to-software ratio. Contact us now.
Monitor your progress
This is last on this startup website guide. You need to keep track of your website’s analytics to know what’s going on because there’ll be adjustments to make over time.
You can use Google Analytics for an in-depth breakdown of your website’s traffic and demographics.
How to use Quicklaunch by Techdella, a website builder for startups
1. Sign up for a Quicklaunch account: Go to getquicklaunch.com/register you’ll need an email address and a password.
2. Choose a template:Browse through our library of professionally designed templates and select the one that best matches your business goals.
3. Customise the template:Use our drag-and-drop editor to make the template your own. Adjust the design, add your content, and change anything to fit your brand.
4. Add content to your pages: Include all the content you prepared: mission statement, about, blog posts, FAQs, etc.
5. Preview your website: Before you go live, take a look at how your website will appear on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. Ensure that everything looks exactly how you want.
6. Go live! Publish your website in just a few clicks and share it. All our templates are mobile-optimised and SEO-ready to help you rank and grow from day one.
Finally…
We’ve come to the end of our journey. You’ve learnt how to create and launch a website for your startup and monitor it’s progress (great job!). Here’s a few things you can do to improve your website:
- Conduct user-testing
- Make your website user-friendly
- Watch your website’s loading speed
- Keep your design current
- Ensure your site is secure
- And update your content regularly.
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