5 Top Tips for Creating Your First Business Website

Creating your first business website is not something to be taken lightly. It takes time and patience to produce something that not only looks good, but also functions efficiently. Planning ahead can be beneficial, save time and effort and avoid hidden costs or prices increasing over time.

Here at NetNerd, we provide web hosting services with a full feature set that can aid our customers with the technical side of things. Since we’re always prepared to go the extra mile, here are five top tips for creating your first business website.

It’s important to choose your domain name wisely as it’s the address of your website and the part of email addresses after the @ sign. The domain you choose is part of your corporate brand’s identity.

Ideally, a domain it should describe your company, product or the service you provide. If you deal exclusively with local customers, you could also include your location in the domain name to improve SEO rankings and further direct them towards your site. At NetNerd, free domain registration is part of our business hosting package, so securing a domain name that works for you couldn’t be easier. We also provide low-cost domain registration separately if you choose one of our other plans.

Above all, it’s important to choose a domain that’s right for you and your business.

How your website performs, and how much value it ads to a browsing experience affects user engagement and search engine rankings.

If your website loads too slowly, you’re visitors won’t stay on your website. Over 50% of users report giving up on any website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Google will also demote you in their search engine rankings as a result of failing their core web vitals assessment.

At netnerd.com we build make the Litespeed web server, object caching, opcache, brotli compression and HTTP/3 available in all shared web hosting accounts in an effort to improve your page load times. We also offer a website performance optimisation service should you need us to help you improve page load times to a greater degree.

The user experience isn’t all about speed, though. How your website is laid out in terms of structure, also affects the experience of website visitors. Structuring your website in a logical manner, and making sure that the majority of pages can be reached within a few clicks of your websites’s homepage is advisable.

Planning your website’s menu structure can help make information on your website more easily found, and keep visitors engaged.

Helpful, informative content gives value to your website visitors. Planning your website’s content, and making it informative, helpful and engaging to your potential customers is beneficial when it comes to both SEO and user experience.

A website that’s deemed to provide value to users, and that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness in it’s subject area, will rank above websites that don’t conform to this.

Having a website that’s easy to use, maintain and update is key for an ongoing, consistent web presence. A website that you find easy to use is more likely going to be one that you update, and add content to. This, in turn, provides value to your website’s visitors.

At netnerd.com we aim to give our customers choice when it comes to managing their wbesites.

The Weebly Web Builder provide an easy to use, drag and drop content management system. No coding experience or previous website design experience is needed to use Weebly. The Weebly Web Builder is also self maintaining negating the need to apply updates to keep your website patched and secured.

WordPress can be installed in a few clicks using the Softaculous App Installer, that’s available in in all the web hosting packages that we offer. Softaculous can also be used to patch and update your WordPress installation automatically.

The Softaculous app installer can also be used to create clones, and staging copies of your WordPress website. This allows you to work on a development copy of your site without affecting the live site. You can test updates and additional functionality that you add to your website, then push these changes to your live site once you’ve verified everything functions well and as it should.

The staging and push to live functionality allows a controlled, functional way to update and manage changes to your website without affecting your live site, or causing any unwanted downtime.

If you’re new to website creation, you may find that you need more services over the course of developing and deploying your website. In some cases, hosting providers charge for additional services such as backups, older versions of PHP, or certificates.

Over time these costs can accumulate to a large amount, which can result in expense for which you haven’t budgeted.

At netnerd.com we build everything you need in for free by default. We don’t charge for add-ons. You pay a single cost for your web hosting account and that gives all that you require to run your website, even with our cheapest web hosting offerings.

We’ve tuned our stack and built in performance enhancing features, without increasing our prices.

We aim to provide cheap fast web hosting to allow you to operate a well performing website with blazing fast page load times, at no additional cost.

We’re not going to charge you anything additional to gain an improvement in performance. The Litespeed web server, object caching and opcache are all built in by default.

With a 99.99% uptime guarantee, and nightly backups that allow you to restore any website file, folder, database, mailbox or DNS zone from any time within the last 14 days, you can host your site with peace of mind.

We also provide UK based telephone support during office hours and 24 x 7 x 365 help desk support to all our customers, regardless of how much they’re paying to host their website.

By default we include the following with all shared hosting packages:

• Daily backups with 14 restore points retained.
• SSL certificates, which are required for HTTPS, end to end encryption and the padlock in your browser’s address bar.
• Legacy PHP support. If you’re using any website components that need older PHP to operate, we’re not going to charge you any extra to be able to do this.
• A plethora or performance enhancing facilities, the Litespeed web server, opcache, object caching, brotli compression and HTTP/3 are available by default.

We aim to provide web hosting that performs well, provides peace of mind, and that comes at a cost effective price point.

Many hosting providers leverage the effort of migrating online services to increase costs over time. With many hosting providers, costs will increase over time due to this. At netnerd.com we avoid this wherever possible, as we wouldn’t like this to happen to us.

We haven’t put our prices up for over seven years. We don’t increase the cost of hosting over time unless we have to. Occasionally we have to increase costs as and when domain registrars put their prices up, or when license costs increase inline with inflation, but we try and keep this to an absolute minimum.

When it comes to costs, we want to provide you with consistent, static pricing wherever possible to allow you to consistently manage your budget. We also aim to provide cheap, fast web hosting to provide the best performance at a cost effective price point.

If you’re ready to start building your first business website, give yourself a head-start by signing up for a NetNerd hosting package today. Not sure where to start? Call our team of experts on 0333 222 4080 and we’ll be happy to assist.