Create a Website for a Small Business

A professionally designed website is an asset to your company, the same as a brick-and-mortar website. The look and feel of your website could make your small business look like a Fortune 500 operation. For this type of result its best to leave the project in the hands of a professional, but if you want to take on the job of putting together your website on your own, make sure you have the required competencies to manage the project efficiently.

1. Understand the competencies that you need to create a website. For one, you should have some HTML knowledge. Since one of the main elements of publishing a website is content, you also need to have writing skills. To assure  an attractive format, a background in graphic design is helpful.

2. Choose a web hosting service that offers a wide variety of features, including domain registration, email accounts, CGI capability (allows you to create web forms), design templates that you can use as a starting point for your HTML web pages (optional), and plenty of storage space (at least one gigabyte for a business website). You'll also need shopping cart software and a merchant account from a third party provider if you plan to sell things on your website.

3. Choose and purchase a domain name that includes either your business name or the name of the types of products or services you sell.

4. Learn, from your web hosting service, how to access your file management or FTP (file transfer protocol) service. The service will provide you with an account user name and password that you'll need to access your files. You may have to download a third-party FTP application like WS FTP or Filezilla to access your website files on your web server.

5. Create HTML files to upload to your web server and save the files to a folder on your computer. These HTML files form the structure of your website and must appear in the "public_HTML" or similarly named folder on your web server. For a business website you'll need at least four pages, including your "home," "product," "about," and "contact" pages. Make sure that you name your homepage "index.htm," or "index.html"—this is the default name most web hosts use to represent the first page people see when they type in your website address. See "Resources" for a resource to learn more about HTML.

6. Write about 350 words on each page of your website to describe the purpose of that page. For instance, for your "about" page discuss the history of your company and how you help customers.

7. Create the design elements of your website including your background image (if applicable) and the page header. Prepare and save any images files to your computer folder as well. If you're not familiar with this step, hire someone.

8. Log into your web server using your FTP program and transfer all of the files you've created from your computer to your web server. When the transfer is complete, type in your website address (such as abccompany.com) to view your website.

9. One more thing: If your web host offers a page building tool use that to create your HTML pages if you're not comfortable with building it from scratch.

Tips: You can also create a website for free using a blogging service like Blogger or Wordpress.

Some people also like to add more complicated elements like Adobe Flash movies (requires special training) and coding in addition to basic HTML, like ASP or Javascript (requires computer programming experience). Due to the amount of training necessary for these competencies, it's best to leave it to a professional.