Giving your business a digital footprint in Singapore is easier than it previously was. The most effective way of marketing your business online in Singapore is creating a website for it. With a good company website, you will not only increase the online perceptibility of your company, but you will also be able to interact with your target market.
You don’t need a complicated website to establish a digital footprint. A simple site design can work for you, especially if your business is relatively small. Thanks to website builders, you can create a website irrespective of your technical expertise.
Whether you are thinking about creating a business website from scratch or you are revamping your current site, there are several decisions that you will have to make. These range from choosing the most suitable domain name to the specific tools and systems that you will use to ensure that your website runs smoothly. Here’s a beginners guide to creating a good company website.
Determine the Type of Website that You Need
There are various types of websites that you can choose. What you choose for your company should depend on the objectives that you want to achieve with the site as well as the functionality needed to accomplish this.
You have several website types to choose from. These include websites that feature a blog, business card sites, portfolio sites, e-commerce sites, and product brochure sites.
Product Brochure Sites
These websites are an extension of the marketing and sales efforts of your company. You can post goods and services offered by your company on its brochure site so that visitors can browse through. The websites can also include pricing guidelines. Nonetheless, these sites don’t offer customers a platform for making online purchases.
Portfolio Websites
A portfolio website is akin to your business card. It is meant to showcase your work and also provide website visitors options for getting in touch with you. Portfolio websites are common among owners of photography studios, web design and development companies, and other creative businesses.
E-commerce Websites
In the tech-savvy world that we are living in, your company should provide Internet users with an online platform for purchasing your products and services. E-commerce websites serve this purpose. With these websites, you get to showcase your services and products besides allowing visitors to buy them online.
Websites With a Blog Section
A blog is among auxiliary features that make your website attractive. You can choose to have your website’s blog as a separate site or have it included on the company website. Typically, blogs contain informative articles on industry-related topics.
Business Card Websites
If your company is still new, all you need is a simplified one-page site that tells visitors who you are besides providing your contact information. You also need to include your business logo and some product information. The essence of having a business card website is to represent your company online.
Choosing the Best Website Builder for a Good Company Website
Thanks to website builders, you can create a good company’s website within a short time and without any technical proficiency. Choosing the best website builder to help you create your site is among the most significant decisions that you will make.
Website builders typically handle the technical jargon involved in the creation of websites. This allows you to focus on creating the site’s content as well as coming up with its design. Your choice of website builder is significant because your site’s functionality will depend on how convenient and proficient the builder is.
Moving your website from the platform that you used to create it isn’t easy. Therefore, you should choose a hosted web builder platform or self-hosted content management system that works best for you.
WordPress is the best website builder for beginners. With this website builder, you can create business card websites, e-commerce sites, and websites that feature a blog section. WordPress is excellent for those who are building websites for the first time yet they are experiencing budget limitations.
Choosing a Hosting Provider and a Domain Name
Once you have selected the type of website that you want, you should also pick a hosting provider and the most appropriate domain name for your site. The domain name that you choose can be something similar to yoursingaporecompany.com.
The domain name that you choose is that bit of the website’s URL that identifies specific web pages. Some website builders can choose the domain name for you. It is advisable that the domain name that you choose reflects your company name.
To choose a domain name, you can check the availability of the name that you intend to use. You should settle for a top-level domain name, which markets your company even before visitors land on your pages.
How to Choose the Best Domain Name
Your domain name helps you present yourself to Internet users. Therefore, you should ensure that it markets your company in a nutshell. The following rules can help you choose the most appropriate domain name.
Keep it Short and Memorable
You certainly want Internet users to remember your site. They can only do so if your domain name is short and memorable. A domain name that comprises dozens of characters is likely to look silly besides being difficult to remember.
Relevance is Crucial
It’s worth mentioning that the domain name you choose for your website needs to be relevant to your business name. Simply put, the domain name should match what visitors see when they land on your pages. If your company’s name is Web Solutions Singapore, for instance, choose a domain name like websolutionssg.com.
Avoid Numbers
You should avoid incorporating numbers into your domain name. Numbers make your website look unprofessional. Similarly, it adds an extra element that visitors will be forced to remember whenever they need to visit the site.
Ascertain that The Branding is not in Existence
There are thousands of websites in Singapore. This means that thousands of domains are already in use. Before committing to a particular domain name, ensure that it will stand out from the crowd once your website gets published.
After settling on a suitable domain name, you should choose a web hosting provider. Your company website’s performance and functionality will to a large extent depend on the hosting provider that you choose. When making this decision, you should only consider hosts who will guarantee the availability of your website to potential visitors at all times.
Your web hosting provider also stores your files online. If you choose a wrong web host, your site could end up experiencing many problems. With a reliable provider, you will be able to maintain a successful website.
Choose Your Templates
After registering a domain, you will be ready to embark on the technical aspects of web design and development. Website builders provide templates rather than letting you create them yourself. The template that you choose will be the framework of your website.
Templates are akin to a painter’s canvas. They let you post content on your site the way you want. A template will help you customise your website and make it look attractive without necessitating the need to hire a web designer. Similarly, templates dictate the colour scheme that you should use as well as the appearance of your site’s menu and header bar.
Irrespective of the website builder that you choose, there is always a limitless range of design templates that you can choose from. Expensive plans generally give you access to more templates. Most website builders provide dozens of templates across different categories. Therefore, your website will have a suitable template regardless of the industry that you operate in.
Customising your Template
Templates provide your site a framework. Owing to the high number of websites in Singapore, there’s a possibility that there are several sites that have a framework that is similar to yours. Rather than working with a template as it has been provided to you, consider customising it with content that is specific to your company.
Customising a template involves the addition of new pages to enhance your website navigation, changing the colour, font, and size of buttons, the addition of elements such as menus and contact forms and the editing of images on your site’s homepage gallery.
While customising your template, you should also ensure that you choose different colour palettes from those that came with the template. Similarly, you should link or embed social media channels so that Internet clients can easily see your site.
Most website builders feature tutorials that will walk you through the process of customising templates. Even if no tutorial is provided, you shouldn’t feel intimidated. The purpose of web builders is to make web design and development easy. Therefore, customising templates is easy.
Previewing and Testing Your Website
Once you have chosen and customised your template, you will be inches away from publishing your website. However, you have to bear in mind that going live before all processes are completed can lead to problems in the future.
Before publishing the website, you should preview all the changes that you made and do split testing. This will help you ascertain that everything is working the way you want. Previewing your website involves ensuring that your content’s grammar and spelling is correct, all menu buttons are working correctly, and that your site fulfils an objective.
Also, a preview will help you determine whether your formatting is consistent, whether the website functions both on mobile and desktop screens, whether the site loads quickly, and whether it is optimised for search engines. It would be calamitous for you to publish an incomplete website.
How to Preview a Website
Previewing a website is one of the technical aspects of web design and development. Fortunately, the editor mode of most website builders features a preview button, which gives you an insight into what your site would look like once it gets published. Similarly, most web builders provide a toggle that lets you see how the site works on different screens.
You should not test or preview your website since you are likely to be blind to faults. Besides this, you know how the website is supposed to work. Navigating the site may be easy for you, but probably not to a stranger. Letting someone else to do the preview will give you a fresh perspective and helpful feedback that can help you correct any mistakes therein.
Publishing Your Website
After reviewing your website and ascertaining that all changes reflect, you should go ahead and publish it. Publishing a website means that it is live. If someone does an Internet search, he/she will see the site. Undoubtedly, one of the main questions that will linger in your mind is how long it will take for the website to appear in major search engines.
If you built a site that is optimised for search engines, it would be visible as soon as you press on the “publish” button. One of the main misconceptions that exist in the public domain is that websites can’t rank well if they got created using website builders.
This isn’t true because Google is more concerned with the quality of your content rather than how you created your website. Therefore, you should observe SEO best practices when building your site since it will go a long way in ensuring that it ranks favourably in search engine results.
Your site may not be 100% ready upon its launch. Therefore, you should ensure that you undertake regular updates to bring it up to speed. Besides updating your website’s content, you also need to check its loading speeds to ensure that users don’t spend too much time waiting for your pages to load.
Conclusion
Creating a good company website in Singapore isn’t as hard as many people have been led to believe. There are dozens of resources that can ease the entire process. The website that you create targets your visitors. Therefore, you should ensure that it makes customer interaction easier. This will go a long way in improving user experience.
Save time and give your business a firm footing in Singapore digital business world by using our tested and proven web design services in Singapore. Call us today at +65 6789 9852 for more details about the website, digital marketing, and SEO solutions that we offer.
