How to Make a Business Website

Why Your Business Needs a Website

Unlike social media profiles, a business website is entirely yours. No one can delete it, suspend it, or change the rules overnight and devalue what you’ve built. At a glance, a business website can help:

• Make your business visible. With a website, customers can find you in search engines and learn about your services before they ever pick up the phone.
• Make your business credible. Not having a website raises questions about your credibility. Having one signals that you take your business seriously.
• Keep your business available. Your site takes inquiries, answers questions, and sells products 24/7 without requiring an employee on standby.

How a Website Reinforces Your Brand Identity

Your business identity is one of your most powerful tools to connect with customers, and that identity is made up of everything from your business name to your custom domain.

Every element of your website, from your logo and color scheme to the wording you use to describe your services, shapes how customers perceive your business before they ever interact with you. A cohesive site makes your business memorable and gives customers something familiar to return to. A Facebook page or Google listing can supplement your business website, but they can’t replace it.

What Powers a Business Website

Before you can start building your website, you need a foundation in place—namely, a custom domain name, and web hosting. These act as the infrastructure behind every business website, and understanding what each one does makes the process of building your site a lot less intimidating.

Domain Names

Your domain name is your business’s address on the internet. It’s what customers type into a browser to find you directly, and the foundation of your online identity. A custom domain also reinforces your brand in ways no Google listing or social media account can.

Customers will react differently to facebook.com/localfarmersmarketcollective versus localfarmersmarketcollective.com. The difference between the two is meaningful: one signals ownership and permanence, the other looks no different from a personal page on a borrowed platform.

Choosing your domain name is one of the earliest and most important business decisions you’ll make when building an online presence. A great domain name will be short, easy to remember, and match or complement your business name.

Find Your Domain Name

Web Hosting

Web hosting is what makes your website visible online. Without it, you’ve got a collection of files with nowhere to live. If a domain name is your address and your website is the house you build on it, hosting is the road that connects it to the rest of the world.

For most small businesses, shared hosting is the natural starting point. Shared hosting means your site lives on a server alongside other websites, keeping costs low without sacrificing performance. This type of hosting is affordable, reliable, and well-suited for WordPress sites (which make up nearly half of all websites) and it’s the most common hosting environment for business websites just getting off the ground.

Other types of hosting include dedicated hosting, VPS (virtual private server) hosting, and cloud hosting. As your site grows in traffic and complexity, you may eventually outgrow shared hosting, but for most businesses building their first website, it’s the right place to start.

Starting or growing a business? Hire Northwest as your registered agent, and enjoy web hosting, email hosting, a custom domain, and access to our sitebuilder for free for as long as your service stays active.

Choose Your Hosting Plan

The Difference Between Domain Registration and Web Hosting

Domain registration and web hosting are two distinct services, but they work in tandem to keep your website up and running. Your domain name is registered through a domain registrar, while your hosting is managed through a hosting provider. In some cases, these are two different companies, which means two separate accounts, two renewal dates, and two sets of settings to manage.

Thankfully, many providers, like Northwest, offer both under one roof. Managing your domain and hosting together simplifies the process and keeps everything in one place, which is one less thing to think about when you’re focused on running a business.

Northwest likes to keep things simple. Get your website with us, and manage your email, web hosting, and domain renewals all in one clean dashboard.

Building a Business Website

With your domain registered and hosting service set up, you’re ready to build. The tool you use to build your website matters. Not only for how it looks or how intuitive it is to use, but for how much control and ownership you have. All of our hosting plans, as well as our sitebuilder, are powered by WordPress.

WordPress is the most widely used website platform in the world, and for good reason: it’s flexible, beginner-friendly, and built around the idea that your site belongs to you.

Why WordPress

WordPress powers nearly half of all websites on the internet, from personal video game blogs to Fortune 500 companies. WordPress has earned its place as the most widely used platform for business websites because it’s flexible enough to grow with your business, supported by a large community of developers and designers, and open-source, meaning no single company controls it or can pull the rug out from under you.

There are two versions of WordPress: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. They share a name but work differently. WordPress.com is a hosted platform that manages your site for you, but on WordPress’s terms. WordPress.org, conversely, is the open-source, self-hosted version that puts you in control. Our hosting uses WordPress.org.

For small business owners, that’s an important distinction. WordPress.org gives you full ownership and control over your site, allowing you to update, migrate, or rebuild from scratch at any time.

How Our Website Builder Works

Getting a website off the ground doesn’t require a developer. Our website builder gives you a head start with a clean, structured single-page site built around the sections every business needs:

• About Us
• Services
• Contact

When you sign up for any of our hosting plans, our team will either build this page for you, walk you through it, or hand you the tools to do it yourself. Choose the option that works best for you.

From there, you’ll be working in WordPress, which means you can expand your site, add content, and customize everything to suit your business needs. WordPress makes that process straightforward, as each element of every page is arranged into simple components called blocks. Each block is a self-contained piece of content that you can arrange, stack, and style without touching a line of code. Blocks include:

• Paragraphs and headings for copy
• Images and videos
• Buttons and links
• Tables, lists, and more

Note: WordPress becomes a powerhouse when expanded with plugins—additional tools that expand what your site can do. This includes SEO plugins to improve visibility on search engines and e-commerce plugins to create and manage product listings and sales. Just be sure to vet these plugins carefully to avoid compatibility issues.

Building a business website involves a few moving parts: your domain name, your hosting, and your site builder. But they don’t have to live in separate places. With Northwest, everything is managed under one roof. Have questions? We’re here to help; reach out to us any time.