How to build your first website

So you’ve decided to build a website for your business, but you don’t know where to start. In this article, I’ll outline the first three things that you should do to get your first website up and running.

1. Create a Homepage

Remember the saying “you only get one chance to make a first impression?” Well, your homepage is the first impression that you’ll make to your site visitors, so it should really reflect what is great about your business and draw the customers in.

When you create your homepage, you should include the following information:

A brief description of your business and what you do
A list of your products or services
One or more photos of the business or your products
Information about where your business is located (if you run a local business, this is critical!)
Other important information that you want to make sure your visitors see. For example special promotions and specific events coming that your customer should be aware of. These will vary depending on your business.

Make sure your homepage is easy to read and has specific information about your business. Remember, this is your face to the online world!

2. Create a “Contact Us” Page

While the homepage will draw potential customers in, the “Contact Us” page will give them all the information they need to find you or reach out to you. When you create this page, make sure to include:

A phone number for customers to call you
Your business address and a map to your location (don’t forget driving directions!)
An online form that customers can fill out to ask questions directly
Links to your Facebook or Twitter pages so that customers can follow you
A signup form to subscribe to your Email Newsletters (if you have one), or to join your email list, even if you don’t have it up and running.

Search engines will be crawling your site, so this page is also very helpful to make sure that you show up when people search for businesses like yours in your city or town.

3. Create an “About Us” Page

The “About Us” page is the place on your website where you can explain to your visitors what makes your business great and why they should work with you. When you create this page, imagine yourself talking to someone you just met on the street who was interested in learning more about what you do. What would you tell them? Some ideas include:

What is your business? What services do you provide or what products do you sell?
Where is your business? Are you a local business or a national business? Do you cover certain cities or towns?
What is the history of your business? Did you start it yourself? Why did you decide to get into the business?
What are the core values of your business? Are you family run? Do you offer a guarantee of 100% satisfaction?
Have your business won any awards? What are your specialties?
Who are you? How many employees do you have and what do they do?

This page should really make it clear what your business is all about and should give your visitors piece of mind that you stand behind your products or services.

These three pages are all you need to get your business online quickly, but once you have them up and running there are plenty of other pages you can add to get more out of your website. I’ll be posting more over the coming weeks about this, but feel free to leave a comment or suggestion about things you’d like to read about. Good luck getting your site launched!

We look forward to working with you to get online, feel free to ask me any questions in the comments.

6 Comments to How to build your first website:

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Mirjana Kljajic on Friday, September 17, 2010 11:52 AM

How do we add a link to facebook and twitter?

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Samuel Johns on Friday, September 17, 2010 12:15 PM

Hey Mirjana, To just add a link to your can do it by using the "Links" feature in the builder or by adding and image such as a logo then add the link to the image. Or you could take the approach some other customers have by getting the Facebook and twitter badges from the respective sites. Here is a conversation I had with some other customers 2 days ago on our Facebook wall. Melina: go to your FB page then click on EDIT PAGE then on the right lower side of your edit page and click on Promote with Facebook Badge- Get Your Badge and then you can -Choose where to add the badge: click on OTHER and a code will come up copy and paste it to your website. Vistaprint Internet Marketing: To complete the process you need to click on "Extas" and use the "HTML" feature to add the "text" here then the badge will show up correctly. For any custom widgets like facebook or twitter you need to use the "HTML" feature in the extras section. There were some other parts of this conversation however this should help you out with what you need. Thanks, Samuel

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ann on Saturday, September 18, 2010 5:28 AM

Hi Jeremy Could you tell me if it is possible to set up private areas using your website builder. I want to be able to give selected clients a password of high value materials. Thanks Ann

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	Samuel on Wednesday, September 22, 2010 7:48 AM Hi Ann, Having a private log in for your customers is something we currently don't offer in the website builder. Thanks for sharing your feature interest with us and we will consider it for future product enhancement, feel free to share any other ideas you have also. Thanks Samuel

Lisa on Saturday, September 18, 2010 10:55 AM

Hi, I am building my website and I have a question with how to set up shipping. I am using the paypal icon from vista print and that asks the shipping for each item but it there a way to set something up that is people purchase 3 products say, then the first product will have the $1.00 shipping and each additional product will be 30 cents...is there a way to do something like that? Thanks! Lisa


	Samuel Johns on Wednesday, October 06, 2010 9:57 AM Hi Lisa, when setting up your shopping cart have you tried setting the shipping price after determining the customers location so the price of the shipping is variable to where they live. This should also place all the items in the shopping cart first then set the shipping. Please let me know if you have more questions and I can look into it for you. Thanks and good luck with the new site.

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