Facing Obstacles When Building Your Startup’s Website

In this technology-driven world, everything must have an online presence. Social media posts have practically replaced traditional word-of-mouth marketing. When someone hears about your startup, chances are they’d Google it or find it on social media right away.

If users don’t see your startup on the Internet, they’d most likely assume it’s not a legitimate business. That’s how the world works today. When we start transitioning to the Metaverse, you’d be truly outdated if your startup doesn’t create its own website yet.

However, building a website is harder than meets the eye. Despite web-creation platforms becoming more available, someone who isn’t tech-savvy will always have a hard time navigating the customization tools. When you start creating your startup’s website, you’ll face the same challenges. Below are the obstacles you should expect:

1. Choosing a Platform

If you’ve never created a website before, you probably imagine it takes complicated coding to get a single homepage ready. But website creation is now made easy, thanks to free platforms like WordPress and Wix. Those two are the most common content management systems (CMS) beginners and pros use.

But while WordPress and Wix are free software, you need to buy a domain and web hosting to make your site official and professional. If you only want to run a personal blog, there’s no need to buy a domain, although you can do that to optimize your website. But businesses are required to purchase a domain and web hosting.

WordPress has a customization tool and free themes. You can also perform coding on it, expanding your customization options and making your website truly one-of-a-kind. Wix, on the other, is more known for creating the best e-commerce sites, like Shopify. But it’s also good for blogs and non-e-commerce brand websites. Its drag-and-drop tool makes its editor easy to use, even for tech beginners.

After choosing a platform and creating content for your website, you’d need to customize your CMS. An expert in custom CMS development and implementation can do that for you. They’re basically web developers who optimize your content and help you drive traffic to your website. Their involvement in your IT team is necessary because it takes a professional to maintain a website and keep its content relevant and updated.

2. Registering Your Domain Name

The domain name is the address or URL of a website. Businesses use their company or brand name as their website’s domain, but you may find that domain registration can be frustrating. If your company or brand name is common, its potential domain name may already be taken.

Worse, cyber squatters often take attractive domain names as an investment then resell them later to legitimate would-be website operators. If your desired domain name happens to be owned by a cyber squatter, then you may have to deal with them to get what should be yours. The only way to avoid that is to choose another domain that won’t confuse your customers.

3. Accessibility

In web development, accessibility means making a website accessible to people of various backgrounds, abilities, and disabilities. Just because you have a target audience doesn’t mean you should restrict access to users outside of your target. For a website to be optimized, it must be available to every user and on every device, be it a laptop, smart TV, or smartphone.

Accessibility becomes challenging when you take people’s special needs into account. For example, a visually-impaired user may require an audio accompaniment with your content. Hence, you’d need to include a spoken version to each of your written content. A deaf user, on the other hand, would need subtitles on video content, so that’s another task.

4. Compatibility

Aside from being viewable on any mobile device, your website should also look the same in every web browser. Everyone may use Google Chrome nowadays, but there are still a few who use Safari or Firefox. So before launching your website, you have to beta-test it on different web browsers.

5. User-friendliness

Users consider user-friendliness as a critical factor for determining a website’s quality. If they can’t find the navigation tools, FAQ, or any other content, they’d leave your website and never come back. So while it’s important to be unique in terms of web design, you can’t be too unique that users can’t predict what they’d see on your website.

Most websites have a standard format: The navigation tools go on top or the side, the cart on the top-left corner, and the FAQ and Support at the very bottom. Follow this format to let users enjoy your website.

With these challenges anticipated and tackled, you can create your startup’s website without much hassle. Invest in the right tools and professionals, too. When it comes to optimizing a site, amateur skills won’t cut it.