Not every small business can afford to hire someone to create or maintain a website. So let’s go over some relatively easy do-it-yourself ways to build your site, kind of two by two. It just so happens that these are all free, or nearly so.
2 Free Website Builders
High up on the cool factor is Roxer. It’s all click and drag, and easy to use. Very Web 2.0. They will let you use your own domain name, like allensretail.com.
Less “wow” but still very easy and polished is Google Pages. One neat feature is that it will automatically make a version of your pages optimized for mobile phone browsers. It will not let you use your own domain name.
To make up for that, I’ll offer a bonus tool: Microsoft Office Live Small Business. One of our rural friends, Shady Hill Farm, uses this tool for their websites. A domain name is included for free your first year, but there is a small annual fee to renew it.
2 Blogging Tools
This is my favorite way to build your own do-it-yourself website!
A blog is just a special website made up of stories or articles, kind of like a newsletter. It also gives customers and readers a chance to comment on stories, building conversations. The two blog services I like are Blogger and WordPress. Both offer a platform for your own blog, and both will let you use your own domain name. The platform includes all the behind the scenes software that does the work. That lets you focus on writing stories, which works about like writing an email. Feeling brave? A blog can also include audio or video clips, not just text.
This is what I use for my liquor store’s website. It provides all the basic contact info, plus I can update it with new product announcements, articles about wines, and drink recipes. You probably already teach customers about your product every day, so you could easily add that info to a blog and share it with your new potential customers.
2 Social Networks Ready to Go
Remember Yahoo! Groups and a dozen other similar group sites? Here are two new ways to do something similar for your fans and community, but in a more business like way.
Ning lets you build a complete social network, with profiles, forums, and everything else. Check out the Small Town group, part of The Society for Word of Mouth at Ning, for an example.
Google Sites are designed for group work online, and offer a bit more collaboration, though a bit less social.
2 Business Site Profiles
If you fill in your business information, your user profile on services like JumpUp or LinkedIn can serve as a website. They are designed for business, so these profiles give you room to include your contact information such as phone and email, details about your line of business, even hours or directions. You want customers to find your profile, so also check the privacy settings to make your profile public. Don’t worry about people mis-using your email or phone number. The truth is that it rarely happens. If you feel more comfortable, use a secondary phone number and email address.
2 Important Tips
1. Get your own domain. Go to any registrar, and you’ll probably pay less than $15 a year for your own domain name, like beckymccray.com. (Sometimes, it’s way less than $15.) Then forward that domain name to the page you’ve created. The way you do this varies with each provider, and a few website tools (like FreeWebs) charge a fee for allowing you to use that domain name.
Two registrars: GoDaddy (which I use) and Network Solutions (which has agreed to sponsor one of our publications).
2. Be find-able. To make sure that customers searching for you can find you, you need to make sure search engines can find your page. Two techniques: keywords and links. Include the right keywords in all of your online presence. Your keywords are your name, your business name, your line of work or brands you carry, and your hometown or service area. Think of the words a customer would be thinking right before they search for a business or solution like yours. Then find other local websites to link to you, and link back to them. Submit your site to a few online directories for your industry for some additional links.
To Summarize
This was all a very basic two by two approach to free web presence tools. I tried to keep it basic, because that’s my point. Keep it Simple.
Plenty more examples, techniques, and ideas can apply to creating your online presence. I’d love it if you would share your stories and links in the comments.
This article is part of the Small Biz 100, a series of 100 practical hands-on posts for small business people and solo entrepreneurs, whether in a small town, the big city, or in between. If you have questions you’d like us to address in this series, leave a comment or send us an email at becky@smallbizsurvival.com. This is a community project!
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
thanks for the great article Becky! there are tips here that I will use to help my small business clients!
As someone who’s small business is (in part) building websites for other small businesses, curses!
Seriously, though, I think the do-it-yourself tools have been great. The more that goes up online the more useful the Internet becomes. I’m surprised the tools aren’t better, though I haven’t checked in with Google pages and the rest for awhile.
The most important things to have up on a website is your contact information, of course. After that I always recommend pictures or something else that will give potential customers an idea of what you’re like. I like your Shady Hill Farm friends for that reason. The white text on lime for the left navigation doesn’t work at all and gives visitors a clue that this isn’t professionally done but the picture and the story telling make me want to go anyway (I’m already a sucker for farm B&B’s!).
I second your recommendation to get your own domain. The biggest advantage is that you can easily move the site to some new system a few years down the road if you grow or something else becomes available. As useful as Google Pages and MS Live are, I always thing there’s got to be a better way to do it.
And blogs can be a great way to get lots of different, keyword-rich content up there. I recently converted a rarely updated “News” section of a site over to a blog (just cutting and pasting the existing items) and put three excerpts on the main site’s homepage. That alone increased the site’s “keyword relevancy” score (as measured by domaintools.com) by about twenty percent. I wouldn’t even worry about keywords. If you talk about what customers are interested in on the blog, then people interested in that will start finding your site. I used to work as the customer service person in a small bookstore with about 50% internet sales and would find myself fielding the same questions every few months. I started copying my email answers into my personal blog and it generated tons of interest. This was no extra work, it was just remembering that an email I was writing was a conversation others might be interested in.
DIY sites that are kept up to date, quirkily revealing and fun are much more interesting (even when they put white text over lime green!) that tasteful high priced sites.
But I do want to remind everyone that small design houses can also be a vital part of the local small business eco-system. The owner of a small design shop I started working at recently seems to know everyone in town, goes cheerfully to every charity event, and recently signed up to sponsor a little league team! A simple professionally-designed site costs a lot less than remodeling a bathroom, say, or any one of a hundred of other normal business expenses. A lot of self-built sites (or worse, nephew-home-from-college-built sites) have major problems that keep them from being visible to Google or make it hard for visitors to get to the information you want them to see. Sometimes a professional touch can make a difference.
Still loving your blog, it’s become one of my daily reads even now when my computer’s died and I’m on a slow backup!
Martin @ martinkelley.com
Martin, huge thanks for the very carefully thought out points you’ve made.
I completely agree that there is an important place for professional help in building effective websites. I say this partially because that is one of the main services I get paid for!
Some small businesses only need a simple presence, and can do it themselves. Others don’t have the time or the inclination to try to go it alone.
A further thought on keywords. Sometimes, it takes a bit of extra thought. My client’s site on hunting is a great site, but seldom used the words “hunting” or “Africa” just because it was completely implied. So I’ve taken some care to mention those words when it fits naturally in the subject. Your advice to talk about what your customers are interested is spot on.
I’ve found several clients that started with an in-house or family-member designed site, that ultimately decided it was time to present a better image. That’s where you and I come in, Martin. We help them present a better image to the world, when they are ready.
Excellent post, Becky! I don’t think I’ve seen one this short that includes such great info on all the best no- or low-cost tools that small firms can and should be using, from site setup to outreach with current and potential customers.
I had a conference call last week with some folks who mostly do B2B and one of the attendees mentioned that she just put up her business’s LinkedIn group 4 months ago and is already getting upwards of 200 new signups a week, so that seems like a great avenue; one I’m looking forward to try as well.
Mark, thanks for the additional tip! Sounds like the groups are working well for at least one business.
A friend on Twitter, Aliza Sherman, just pointed me to another Roxer-like tool, Web Node. And her friend Matt Musgrave added Weebly to the list. Thanks, folks!