How to Make a Web Site for Your Startup

Your business needs a website. It’s not hard to make a site, but it is important! I always tell entrepreneurs that you can pay for a website one of two ways: with money or with time. Having a website legitimizes your business, and it can even be a factor that funders look at when they consider your investment worthiness.

Paying With Time

If you have a lot of time, some experience with making websites, and a big store of patience, you can roll your own site. Here are a few of the more popular tools for doing that:

WordPress

I’m a fan of WordPress and have been using it since 2004. It was originally created as a blogging platform, but it can just as easily be used to manage a website. It’s highly customizable, with a huge community of developers making solutions (in the form of plugins) for almost any problem you want to solve. There’s a good reason WordPress is used by as much as 30% of the web. One of my favorite add-ons for WordPress is WooCommerce, a great set of plugins for selling stuff with WordPress.

Squarespace

Squarespace touts themselves as an easy solution for making sites, and simple drag-and-drop templates. Their web sites are nice-looking, but their popularity is fueled by a pretty aggressive marketing campaign. They have an interesting offer for a website paired with Google G Suite integration here.

Shopify

Shopify is more than a website builder – it’s an eCommerce platform. You can set up eCommerce with any of these solutions, but Shopify was built with this in mind. Credit card processing and other features are built right in.

Wix

Wix is a popular solution, known for their free sites. There are a lot of ugly Wix sites out there, but some nice ones, as well.

Paying With Money

If you want to get started more quickly, focus on your core competencies, and have someone build you a great-looking site, you have plenty of options! One of my favorites is Bet Hannon Business Websites. Bet and her team are great to work with – real people who will work with you to meet your web needs.

I already have a site

Good for you! If you want a free 2-3 minute video review of your website, Bet Hannon is offering a free assessment of websites for entrepreneurs. She and her team will tell you what’s working and what you can improve. It takes about 30 seconds to sign up for this, and it’s totally free.

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