Thirty years ago, a lot of people used physical directories, like the Yellow Pages, to find businesses. Nowadays, it's very likely that your target market is online. With 4.5 billion active internet users worldwide and 30 years of people using search engines to find businesses, a website for your small business can be crucial in reaching out the right audience with all the information they need about what you're offering them. 

A website acts as an extension of yourself; doesn't just display product or service info like other marketing platforms but also helps potential buyers take their first steps towards becoming loyal customers by providing contact details and enabling easy checkout options via e-commerce store pages - something which Facebook lacks completely!

It's not enough to have a Facebook Business Page and an outdated phone number these days.  A site for your small business can help you reach more customers and generate sales, but it also helps to communicate who you are as an entrepreneur. It’s often possible to use your domain name in advertising so that potential clients know they have found what they want: someone that has the solution to their problem, that they can trust with their money.

It’s important to remember that your site will have an effect on how customers perceive you. For example, a website with lots of big images and bright colors is often associated with creativity or youthfulness, while sites without any images may be perceived as more serious...or dated.  Part of creating the ideal website design is not just understanding your business, but really understanding your customers on a deep level, and what they expect to see when they find a business like yours.

Remember that a website is not only for displaying information about your products or services. It’s also the best way to connect with potential clients and interact with them as well. With so many different ways to contact people these days, it can be hard to get someone's attention through email, phone calls, social media posts, etc.  So with all that being said, let's get to work answering the most pressing questions you need answered when deciding how to get a new or improved website for your small business.

It's important to remember that your website is a representation of both you and the products or services you provide. You want it to be informative, interesting, and inviting for people who visit it. What information do customers expect to see when they find a business like yours? What differentiates your business from your competitors?  What is special about your business that a potential customer could relate to on a human level?  And...where are you and when are you open???  Statistics show that websites without easy to find contact information  are much less likely to be contacted...because visitors will just leave your site when they can't easily figure out how to contact you.

If you are still unsure of what to include on your website, there's no shame in asking for help! There are a number of agencies that specialize in creating websites for small businesses, including ours!

If you are the one doing all of the work, you could just use a free web hosting site like Weebly or WordPress.org to get started and see how everything goes before paying for anything else.  If your business is more complicated than that, or you want to build the kind of foundation that can support serious business growth, then it might be worth spending some money on a domain name and website builder software package so that you can start building their "blog" as soon as possible.

If you are prepared to invest in your business from the beginning, you can hire a professional to walk you through ecommerce options, setting up your store, and designing your site to make sure you really get the most of out your online business. Some developers will offer maintenance packages so the site can grow with you, or you can opt for a subscription based service like 229websites.com that makes sure your site is always up to date and optimized.

If you go the website builder route be careful when choosing which one to use, as many of them have hidden costs and restrictions down the road.  Make sure you have one that provides fast hosting, a low cost or free SSL to provide a secure site, and portability so if you decide to move or upgrade your site down the road you don't have to completely start from scratch.

The choices of ecommerce platforms can be overwhelming, especially when you're just starting out as an online entrepreneur. With so many options to choose from, it's difficult to know what the best one for your business is.

The first step in creating a successful store should always start with choosing the right design.  Once you know what design elements and functionality you need from your ecommerce site it becomes a lot easier to choose the correct platform! 

Ecommerce platforms are software applications that help entrepreneurs manage their marketing and operations on top of setting up an online storefront - which makes them essential building blocks for any retailer or hobbyist looking to build a website-based shop quickly and easily with or without hiring programmers.

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between those ecommerce platforms? Well, one of the main differences can be found in customization. Open source and SaaS offer more freedom for developers to make changes as they see fit while headless commerce provides a pre-made solution with no room for modifications whatsoever. 

The other major point of differentiation lies in performance: open source and Saas have less storage space than their counterparts, but are capable of higher traffic volumes; whereas headless commerce stores your product data on an external database server that has up to 20x greater capacity (and speed) than its competitors do--thus providing faster page loading times!

SaaS platforms offer out-of-the box ecommerce store design experience. You can get a new online shop up and running in hours with the drag and drop visual editor, but you'll be limited to basic customization options like loading different layouts or changing colors.

What if you want your brand's logo on every page? How do we go about adding custom features into our site without having an expert designer or coder at hand? Luckily for us there are open source solutions that allow anyone who knows how to use WordPress (or whichever CMS) enough time and effort will create any sort of website they could imagine!

There are many different types of ecommerce platforms that offer a wide variety of features. However, few give you the ability to customize your store as much as you desire without hiring developers or designers on-staff for customization purposes. Open source ecommerce solutions allow more flexibility and creativity in design by giving users full control over their website's content and layout; however, this makes it difficult to maintain because there is no built-in customer support system available like those found with commercial software providers such as Shopify - which also offers limited customizability in its out-of-the box templates but includes an easier onboarding process than open source options do (also providing unlimited online storage).

The best option for those looking to save time and money on website design is using a custom built ecommerce solution that offers unlimited flexibility in how your store displays, as well as more affordable pricing than commercial software providers. The downside? You'll need to find developers or designers who can build this backend system with you - but the upside is they will be able to create exactly what you want out of their designs without constraints put in place by pre-built templates.

Customers often have questions about which type of platform would work better for them, so below are some things to consider when deciding: 

Average monthly cost: $0-$250 (for open source) vs. $25-$200+/month (commercial). 

After choosing  design, which functions are most important to you, and a platform, you will need to start gathering or creating collateral.  Ecommerce sites require beautiful photography, great product descriptions and high-quality videos of your product demonstrations.  You'll also have to have all of your pricing down, including shipping options, and decide how you will handle things like sales tax.

Finally you need to decide which payment processor to integrate your site with.  If you are smaller or just starting out you will most likely want to consider a company like Stripe or Paypal, but if you are a larger or more established business you can likely integrate your site with your current credit card processor or bank.

So let's talk about inventory management and logistics for a minute and the how this might work on an ecommerce site. Let's say we have a store with 100 items in stock, but only 20 of those are currently listed for sale online. When someone purchases one of these twenty items from our website, what happens? Does it automatically go into our system as sold?  Or do we have to track it?  And how would we match up that sale to our other inventory systems if we aren't only selling online?

These are all good questions, and ones that we need to be aware of if we're trying to keep track of inventory in the most efficient way possible. The answer is not as straightforward as you might think though because it really depends on what type of software your website is built with (or what third party ecommerce platform you use). 

Some systems will automatically update their inventory so that when a sale is made, they know which one has been sold out of stock. Others have features like "auto-replenishment" where items are automatically reordered from a supplier or manufacturer based on how much stock an item currently has available for sale online. Auto-replenishment can make things easier because ideally  there's no waiting around for something to come in after you run out, because you order so regularly you never run out of stock.  This can help with profit margins, as well as help keep customers happier. by not having to wait for an item.

Ultimately, there are a lot of moving parts with any type of software that manages inventory and the features they offer will change depending on what you're trying to do (sell physical items or digital goods).  The best way to decide which system is right for you is to check out different options by analyzing their pros/cons against your current needs. Then make a decision based on what systems can help you get where you want more quickly than others.

One of the biggest decisions you'll make when considering designing and launching your own website is whether or not to go with an off-the-shelf solution (a template) or start building from scratch yourself. 

There are pros and cons for both, but it's important that you don't just evaluate this decision in terms of what will save time and money up front - there can be long term costs if you choose incorrectly. For example, templates may work well enough at first, but they often lack features as your needs change and it may not be easy to move your site from one theme to another.

This is particularly true with a lot of builders like Wix, Shopify, Godaddy website builder, etc.  Most of their sites, themes, and builders are proprietary and they offer no easy way to move your website to a different platform. 

If you're building from scratch, consider paying a professional designer to do the site for you.  This will cost more up-front but it's worth it if your company is growing and needs help with branding or marketing materials.  If you are not already a professional web developer the learning curve also won't be worth your time. Better to invest in your business and give yourself the freedom to focus on what you do best.

Off-the-shelf solutions are designed to be simple and easy for even novice website users. They're often less expensive, too.  So cost can definitely be a consideration when making this decision.  But keep in mind that less cost up front can cost you a lot more in the long run.  A lot of modern templates are designed with user experience in mind and can get the job done, but what if you edit out important elements that cost you sales in the long run. 

Even if you only lost 5% of the customers you would have had...how much will that cost you over the lifetime of your website.  Conversely how much would your business grow if an extra 5 out of every hundred website visitors made a purchase year over year?  Be careful not to hold your business back in the name of saving some money up front.

Starting from scratch can be extremely time consuming, expensive, and difficult to manage over time, but it gets you the freedom to build whatever you want.  you can add features, functions, and any design elements you want to get the exact site you think you need, but updates and changes and maintenance will usually also come at a much higher cost.

For most small businesses a blended option where you consult with a professional to customize a template and integrate the custom features you need will be a great solution.  Pay as you go website services like 229websites.com can also be a good option in this area because they not only customize a theme for you, they provide all future updates and maintenance for one fixed cost.

It's not as difficult as you might think. Themes often have a different layout and color scheme, but many of the functionalities are retained regardless of which theme is chosen. You may have to invest some time cleaning up styling issues like out of place fonts and images, but the overall structure and feel of the site should hold pretty well in most cases. So if you have decided to use a theme on a website builder just get started, you can always change the theme next week, next month, or even next year if you find a better fit.

If there are some features that aren't available in your desired theme, it may be possible to request them from the company who provides free or paid hosting for those themes within their website builder platform (i.e., Shopify). It'll just depend on whether they're willing to make any changes based on feedback from one customer; if so, then this lessens the difficulty significantly! 

This is particularly true on Wordpress where many themes are built by individual programmers who want to keep their customers happy.  Also in Wordpress if you are missing a feature in your theme, it's usually pretty easy to find a plugin that will add the function you want to that theme.

WordPress is a content management system that makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website. It powers over 40% of all the websites and blogs on the internet, so you can be sure there's no shortage if information or support available for WordPress users!

It also has an open-source license under GPLv2, which means anyone can use or modify its software for free.

What does that even mean?

Basically that means that you can use Wordpress to build your website, and it has almost unlimited capacity when it comes to website design.  So it's suitable for really basic websites as well as incredibly large and complex websites. And there are no shortage of programmers or solutions to help you create either!

The WordPress ecosystem now includes all the tools you need to create a website that will be perfect for your needs.

In recent years, as more and more people found out about this simple platform, it has become one of the most popular web design platforms in existence. Nowadays, thanks to changes on both sides of its core code – including an updated user interface – coupled with plugins and themes from other developers around the world (which can be used individually or together), there’s not much you cannot do with WordPress!

WordPress has grown to become a powerful tool for creating any type of website. That’s because it powers many different WordPress-based sites and the core code is modified from time to time in order to accommodate more functionality, plugins, themes are available on an extensive marketplace that enable you to create all sorts of websites including eCommerce stores or blogs.

SEO at it's most simple is a term for all the factors that add up to help search engines decide when to show your business in search results, and when not to.

When considering a new website, it's critical to consider that speed and user experiences on your website can have a big impact on how well and how often your business shows up in front of the right people

Once a business has a website, their next question frequently becomes, how do I get my website to rank in Google? 

Some SEO experts say to start by using Google's Keywords Tool, which provides statistics on the number of searches for particular words or phrases and how competitive a word is.  This tool can help you determine whether it makes sense to focus your efforts in these areas.  However, if we take a look at Moz data (the most popular search engine data tool, you can see that Google rarely seems to give accurate data anymore.

If you've been in business a while, you know what most customers are looking for when they find you, so start there.  If you are a local restaurant, most people are going to find you by typing in phrases like "restaurants near me" "best restaurants in Columbus, Ohio", "Italian restaurants in Pittsburgh" so start by using what you know, and focusing on ranking for things you know people are searching for without any keyword data.

Once you have your primary keywords and phrases identified , it's time to understand what Google is really looking for when deciding what businesses to put in the top search results. 

The main components to ranking your website at the top of Google are:

a) relevance to the search query;  Meaning, does Google believe the content on your website is what the person is looking for based on what they typed into the search window?

b) link or inbound anchor text back to your site that is descriptive of what you offer; aka, do links on your site and to your site contain terms that support the theme of your site

? c) trustworthiness and quality as determined by Google algorithms based on a variety of factors like how many other sites link to you, how old your website domain name is, whether it's mobile-friendly, and how long people typically stay on your site when they get there

.d) using Google products effectively.  Even though Google doesn't publicly admit it, using your GMB(Google My Business) page correctly, running Google Adwords campaigns, etc. can be massive factors in how your site shows up in search engines

.e) for local searches, location becomes a very significant factor in search results.  As in our earlier example, if someone is searching for "best restaurants near me", the further you are from their current location, the harder it will be for you to show up in results for that search(but not impossible)

.f)  Consistency:  If your business has different addresses, phone numbers, hours of operation, website addresses, and descriptions all over the internet, search engines will error on the side of caution and show your business to less people rather than risking showing them the wrong information

There are many other nuances that go into how high your business appears in Google, but those are the key factors you need to consider. 

Even though you should design your site for user experience, you also will be making a critical error if you don't consider the above points during the design phase.  For example if you want to rank for "insurance agent in Nashville, TN" and your site only talks about policy types and customer service, you will struggle to rank without content that directly speaks to your being an insurance agent in Nashville, TN.  Error on the side of simple and direct for both  better customer experience AND better search engine results.