You have just opened your box. You have a business plan, a communication strategy, and yet, don’t have a website. In addition to providing visibility and serving as a showcase on the web, a website also serves as a place where supply and demand meet. So it is a real challenge for professionals. Don’t panic, it’s not as complicated as it sounds to make one.
Website pre-launch phase
Before launching your company website, you need to define its purpose correctly. It can be a showcase site, a means of disseminating information, or even a new sales channel. According to these criteria, the technical aspect, complexity and budget required will not be the same.
With regards to your domain name, make sure it is relatively easy to pronounce, remember, and not too long to write. Of course, this should reflect your professional activity and your company. You will also need to choose your target, i.e. if you want to reach a regional, national or international customer, which may affect your domain name.
Then comes the “content” part which will directly affect the structure of your site. This is commonly known as the site tree. The latter, of course, must be adapted to your objectives, your resources, your activity and, of course, your goal. It can be relatively static, especially if you want to build a showcase site, but it’s always useful to plan a newsletter to move content or at least, to keep up to date with your news. Schedule a time to update your site regularly. A regularly updated site will be more likely to appear on search engines, and vice versa. Having significant visibility on the web is a must. So use the relevant context.
In terms of graphics, the site should be simple in the eyes of Internet users, paying more attention to ergonomics first. Be careful not to put too many advertising banners that may scare your visitors.
website creation
Depending on your budget, you can hire a web developer. This person will generally take care of hosting the site. A host is defined as a service provider that ensures that the pages of your site are accessible online. Yet this solution is quite expensive, just like the one intended for using a web agency. You can also choose to build the site yourself, some platforms allow you to build it for a few euros, as long as you are a bit resourceful. Another solution: Create a blog using a platform with sometimes limited but free functionalities.
Don’t hesitate to use social networks and provide buttons that allow you to relay, for example, your content. For example you have the possibility to link your site to a page like Facebook. However, this requires additional time to manage the page (animate the account, get fans to subscribe (or make them like the page) but in advance with some tools like Hootsuite for example can be done.
Ideally, choose a responsive version so that it automatically adapts to reading on a smartphone, knowing that more than half of Internet traffic is now carried through this channel.
legal obligation
Certain formalities must be respected as they constitute legal obligations. You should actually display the legal notice of your site, namely: the name of the editorial manager, the name and contact details of the host, the name of the webmaster, the number certifying your registration with CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’ Informatique) et des Libertes), and Notes on Intellectual Property.
The fact of specifying these mentions has several advantages: respecting the Law for Trust in the Digital Economy (LCEN) and thus avoiding restrictions for the latter respecting your site (logo, image, text, brand, etc.) to protect With the help of a paragraph on the rights and copyrights of the author, and in order to instill confidence in the visitors of the site, the elements which are mentioned for the credibility of the site.
Contrary to popular belief, you can’t download images you find on Google to put them on your site. There are some free image banks and others that are paid.
additional options
In a possible search logic, it is more than wise to set up at least one contact form or a page with your contact details. The visitors of your site are certainly interested in your products and / or services, in that it is interesting to retrieve their coordinates. This will create a database. You can also use this method through request to subscribe to newsletter, fill in quotes etc.
Another possibility: online sales. The company’s logistics must be optimized to ensure timely delivery. An ordering and payment system should be implemented. In this case assume the management of your stock to avoid possible breakage or not being able to respect the delivery time, which will damage your e-reputation and thus your image. While an e-commerce site remains overwhelming, it’s usually a question of integrating a person capable of managing it into your team or calling a service provider.