If you’re starting a small business or you have a brick-and-mortar company looking to find a way to be recognized online, then a website is your gateway to achieving that.
As we become more digital, consumers tend to look at a company’s website before they make purchases. And if you don’t have a site, you might be losing out on potential customers.
Sure, you can hire a web developer to make a website for you. But if you’re looking to save money, then you can always build the website yourself.
Don’t worry, we’re here to help you every step of the way.
In this article, we’ll detail the 6 steps on how to make a company website.
To make it easier for you, we’ll put our focus on making a website through WordPress and Bluehost.
So are you ready?
Let’s begin!
Video Tutorial: How to Make a Company Website
Here’s a video guide on how to create your company website using WordPress:
How to Make A Company Website in 6 Steps
Here are the 6 steps on how to make a company website:
- Plan your website
- Get a domain and hosting
- Set up WordPress
- Choose a theme
- Add pages
- Play around
Let’s get into the details of each step.
How to Make a Company Website Step #1: Plan Your Website
The first step to any project is planning.
Even if you’re itching to get started building your site, going ahead without any idea of what you want to create is going to waste time.
So let’s start with the basics.
What should your company website achieve? Is it to build awareness? Drive foot traffic to your physical store? Or maybe sell products online?
If it’s to sell products online, then you need to create a website that has marketing and conversion in mind. Since these metrics affect your sales, you have to plan your marketing strategy to make people interested enough to buy.
On the other hand, if it’s to build awareness or drive foot traffic, you’re building an informational website.
Identify Your Web Pages
Let’s say you just want people to know more about your company so that they can visit your physical store.
The basic pages your site will need are a homepage, an about us page, a product page, and a contact us page.
When you know your web pages, you’ll be able to identify what content you need for each page. List them down and identify them as multimedia, copy, data, etc.
Gather Your Content
Once you know what you need, it’s time to start planning the content.
As any project goes, doing all of these on your own is not going to be efficient. If you have a team, best to assign certain types of content to those who are skilled in those areas.
It’s also ideal to set deadlines on when the content should be done so that it won’t cause a delay to the launch date of your website.
If you have a marketing team, it’s best to coordinate with them when it’s ideal to launch your website, so that they can announce it in your stores or social media accounts.
How to Make a Company Website Step #2: Get A Domain and Hosting
Let’s move on to the more technical parts of creating a company website.
Any website, whether it’s for business or blogging, needs two things – a domain name and a hosting plan.
A domain name serves as the address where your website will be found. Meanwhile, hosting is what allows you to put your website on the internet.
Now, before you choose a hosting plan, it’s best to identify the number of visitors you’re expecting and the number of multimedia files you will have.
Why? Most web hosts charge you for certain bandwidth and storage space. So if you’re expecting to have a lot of visitors and heavy files, it’s best to go with a plan with big bandwidth and storage.
However, if your company is only starting, you don’t need to worry too much about that.
Pick A Hosting Type
As we said, for hosting, we’ll direct you to Bluehost.
It has a one-click WordPress installation, plus super affordable plans.
With Bluehost, you get different types of hosting – Shared, VPS, and Dedicated Servers.
Since we’re only starting, let’s go with the Shared Hosting plans first.
A Shared Hosting plan at Bluehost starts at around $3.00/mo. This already includes a free domain registration for a year, a free SSL certificate, and 10GB SSD storage.
In other words, all the essentials are present in the basic package.
Check out Bluehost to see all its Shared Hosting plans and awesome features.
Once you know what your site needs, select the plan that best fits your budget and preferences.
What’s great about Bluehost is that if you need to upgrade your plan, you can just contact their customer support team. They can upgrade your plan and make the necessary transfers.
Register Your Domain
When you pick a plan, you will be directed to the registration page. This comes in two parts. First, the domain name registration, and second, the account registration.
For first-time site owners, you need to register a new domain under ‘Create a new domain’. This also checks if the domain name you’ve chosen is not already taken.
To help you out, here are some tips for picking a domain name:
- Avoid hyphenated and hard-to-spell words
- Use the relevant keywords to your company (e.g. industry, products)
- Keep the domain name short
- Don’t make it too specific that it hinders your company to expand to other product lines or industries
- Use the appropriate extension for companies (.com)
The key to making a domain name for companies is to stay relevant within your industry. This is so you can take advantage of search terms.
That said, the domain name shouldn’t be too specific that it hinders your company from expanding.
Already thought of a domain name? Try it out on the registration page and see if it’s approved.
If your domain name doesn’t have any matches yet, you’ll see this message after entering your chosen name:
Fill Up Your Account Details
We move on to the second part of the registration — choosing the details of your plan and creating an account with Bluehost.
All you need to do is fill up the information being asked for on the registration page.
There’s also a portion where you’ll be asked about add-ons, such as security features, SEO tools, advanced SSL certificates, etc.
Settling Your Payment
The last part is the payment page. Just fill up the details of your preferred payment method and then click ‘Submit’ at the bottom portion of the page.
Take note of the Terms and Conditions of Bluehost (or any other web host) as some will charge higher fees after the introductory period is over.
How to Make a Company Website Step #3: Set Up WordPress
After signing up, you’ll be given access to your account.
On your homepage, look in the upper right-hand corner — the login page for WordPress is there. Click that button and log in your credentials to WordPress.
After logging in, the WordPress dashboard will appear. This is where you can navigate to other features such as themes, pages, settings, and plugins.
It’s so easy to set up WordPress with Bluehost, right?
How to Make a Company Website Step #4: Choose a Theme
Every company has its branding.
You have your color palette, font styles, and tone. You also have a certain audience you want to appeal to.
But before we get to the designing portion, we want to focus first on the overall theme of your website. This refers to the layout, colors, etc. In other words, it’s the “look and feel”.
You can pick a theme under the Appearance section found on the left side of the WordPress dashboard.
When you select ‘Themes’, you’ll be brought to your account’s library. Since this is a new account, it’s going to show a blank page.
To add a theme, click the ‘Add New’ at the top of the page.
The picture above shows what the theme library looks like. You can search themes using common keywords like ‘education’, ‘blog’, ‘eCommerce’, etc.
Depending on what your company is, some themes will be better suited for your audience. Remember, these themes come with a template of designs for its pages.
If you don’t see a theme that has the designs you want, you can always pick a theme that’s close enough to your imagined design and customize it.
To do so, click the theme and it will automatically appear in your library. From there, hover your mouse over the theme and click ‘Customize’.
Customizing a theme allows you to change the default font styles, sizes, and layout of the pages.
Speaking of pages, we’ll be talking about how to add pages to your site in the next section.
How to Make a Company Website Step #5: Add Pages
During the first step of our planning stage, we identified four primary pages of any company website — the homepage, product page, about us page, and contact page.
The first step is always to create a homepage.
Since the homepage is the first thing visitors see, you want to make a good first impression.
To do that, you can decide to have a video or photo that will evoke emotion. Of course, make sure that it’s related to your company.
For example, your company sells personal care items. You want the first image or video to show your product and a caption of your company’s motto.
You don’t have to pack everything on your homepage since the other information will be found on other pages.
To create a new page, go to Pages > Add New.
Each new page will have a blank template that only consists of text blocks. You can add different types of texts and multimedia.
This is the part where you’ll need to have your content ready, so creating each page will be faster and more efficient.
We recommend placing all the elements first before you add the design. This way, you see everything as it is first and then you can rearrange the layout later.
How to Make a Company Website Step #6: Play Around
And for the last step, it’s time to design your company website.
What we love about this part, especially if you’re using Bluehost, is that you can take advantage of the AI-driven templates. This means that Bluehost already has suggestions on how you can better arrange your texts, photos, and videos.
You can also adjust the sizes and styles of your copy. As seen in the photo above, you can add titles, subtitles, and descriptions of multimedia files.
What about a mobile-friendly layout? Bluehost can do that for you, too!
Each template is already designed to be mobile- and tablet-friendly. This will help you make your company website easily accessible on all devices.
Not to mention, it improves your search results rankings.
Finishing Your Website
And there you have it, your company’s first-ever website.
We know… Creating a website is easier said than done, but at least you now know the 6 main steps on how to create a company website.
All you need is a trustworthy CMS such as WordPress and a web host that has affordable plans like Bluehost.