Building a website can feel time consuming, and it’s often an afterthought. In partnership with Squarespace, we take you through some quick and easy steps to get a great website up.
Setting up a functional website is something business owners often overlook. Building something slick can take a lot of time away from running your business, and paying a professional isn’t always ideal when margins are tight. To help take the guesswork out of the DIY approach, we’ve compiled a step-by-step guide to get you set up with a great-looking website for your business.
Head over to Squarespace, sign up for a free trial, and have a look around. You don’t have to enter any payment details when you create an account, so you can take a look at different features and try out a few templates with no commitment required.
Tip: You don’t need any coding experience to build a website on Squarespace – everything is click, drag and drop.
This is probably the most important step, and definitely the most fun. Scroll through Squarespace’s many templates and experiment with what looks and feels best for your business. This will save you a lot of time on picking a layout, and your template is still customisable if you want to tweak to suit your needs. If you need a hand picking a template, check out our guide on what will work best for your brand. All templates offer the same functionality, but each one presents a different stylistic starting point.
Tip: Get a friend or business partner to take a look at your choice before you continue. You’d be surprised at what another set of eyes will notice that you might have missed.
This is where you can add branding, logos, colours and anything else that makes your business identifiable. Think of the template as the foundation of your website; you can personalise elements to make it unique to your business. Once you start adding personal touches you’ll understand what tools (in the next step) suit your needs and how you’ll want to lay them out or locate them across the site.
Tip: Have all your branding assets ready to go and stored in an accessible folder beforehand to help speed this process up – there’s nothing worse than having to stop halfway through because you don’t have a web-ready logo handy. If you don’t have a logo, you can make one with Squarespace’s free logo builder.
Once you’ve picked a template, adding specific tools will make your website function specifically for your business. Turn your website into an online store, add a booking service or other third party extensions. Some handy ones include branded parcel tracking, a shipping dashboard for your online orders and a stock management portal.
Tip: While a lot of the tools you’ll need won’t necessarily be customer-facing, it’s good to have them all set up behind the scenes before you launch your website. It’ll ensure things run smoothly for the first visitor and encourage repeat business.
Make sure you add social badges, newsletter sign-up links and similar to your site. Social media is a powerful (and free) marketing tool, so it pays to have a presence on Facebook, Instagram and more. These platforms also act as a great way to direct traffic to your website. Allowing customers to interact with your business on a website feels more polished and professional than on social media.
Tip: Hosting special offers, discounts and exclusive information on your website is a great way to drive traffic to your business. You can tease these on social media.
Whatever your idea is, launch it with a Squarespace website. Head to Squarespace.com today for a free trial and use offer code BROADSHEET for 10% off your first website.
This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Squarespace.
