So you might be a newbie, never had a website before and that’s okay! Perhaps you’ve jumped from the 9 to 5 and are starting your own service-based business as a provider of professional services. Maybe you’ve just got your life coaching certification or passed the RD exam, congrats! Or maybe you’ve finally found the confidence to start over with your soul-aligned, passion and purpose-led business and you are wondering what is all this marketing stuff?!!

We know there’s a lot of information out there about what’s best, and what’s not, so we wanted to keep this ultra basic as a launching point for your journey to owning a website. This guide will lead you step by step through all our articles related to this and if you prefer to read offline – pick up our free Website Planning Guide.

What are the common website pitfalls we’ve seen?

Three of the biggest pitfalls we’ve seen in our 20+ year experience in the web design industry is clients :

• Having to rename their business and start over
• Not understanding the 3 core basics of getting online – domain names, email hosting, web hosting/platforms
• Not being financially prepared to invest

Choosing a great business name

When you are starting your own business there’s a lot of setup. You only have to do it once, thankfully, if you’ve done your homework. Sometimes people change business names and they have to do it all again so we will help you right there. There’s a lot to consider with business names. You want a name that’s going to be a big enough umbrella to cover all your future business-related activities. For example, you are offering nutritional advice but you decide to bring on a team of nutritionists. It may have first seemed good to use your name as the business but now with others involved, it doesn’t make sense. Typically if you see yourself wanting to sell your business or have an exit strategy, you want to have a name around your primary activities or services. However, if you plan to be the primary person in the business and you may have a team supporting you but not offering the same services as you, it’s easier to build a brand around your own name. Your name is already a legal entity as a sole proprietor, so you don’t need any setup a business entity or do anything official yet. You can start trading under your own name. If you plan to build an audience, be seen as an expert, publish a book, be a speaker, or offer one on one services or advice or coaching in your own name – you’ll want your own domain name anyway because people will be looking you up online. So it is smart to grab this while you can.

So in summary for our purposes here, if you plan to grow a personal brand and work in person with people, using your own name is fine to start out with. If you end up growing a team, or want to build the business beyond you being the primary service provider, you may need to change your name to something more inclusive as a group practise. You can do this down the track fairly easily by incorporating the company. It will involve changes in your domain name, and website, which may affect your SEO, so you’ll want to be careful changing names unless it’s absolutely necessary. It pay to know what your goals and targets are for your business.

[If you’d like to consult with us on a strategy call, you can book a call here.]

Related:
Business Name Generators.
Read More Choosing a great business name
Checking trademarks, social media accounts, domain names

Choosing a great Domain Name

Once you have a business name, you’ll want to check for your domain name which is your address online. You’ll also want to check social media accounts too to see if they are available.

Set up your professional business email account

Once you’ve got your domain purchased, you’ll want to set up a professional business email account. While some domain name registrars and web hosting companies offer email hosting as a service, in our experience they exist on the same server as your web hosting environment and we don’t recommend this. Why?

Because if your web server goes down, what’s the first thing you are going to want to do?

You will need your email. Email is a mission-critical business system, and with this you don’t want your email hosting tied to your web hosting. There are others reasons we’ve come up against as well, such as if you change records on your domain name, it effects your email service and can take it down. It much easier to move providers if you don’t have a bunch of services tied together. E.g getting your domain with a website platform such as Wix and Squarespace. If you ever want to move on from Wix (and we have a lot of clients who come to us to move their Wix and Squarespace sites over to WordPress) you’ll have a much harder time if your domain is tied to it.

So what do we recommend?

The simplest set up for a small service based provider is Google Workspace, professional emails cost approx $5 per month. If you have more staff, you can add on emails to it at the same cost per user. Or if you are a bigger company, you’ll want to employ a email network specialist to set up Microsoft 365 for example.

The reason we like Google is it will set you up with a Gmail as well which you can use your business email to login to this email program to check your emails. You don’t need MS Outlook or Apple Mail. Gmail you can check on any browser, you can get an app on your phone as well. You can also set up your account on MS Outlook or Apple Mail if you want, it will pull it into it.

the other reason we like it is you get access to a lot of free software essential to your business without having to pay for it, such as Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides etc. Unless you have very heavy word processing needs (aka you are lawyer or you work with complex documents that you need to track changes etc) Google docs has everything you need. Same with Google sheets, again unless you need complex macros. Coming from a MS environment, I coped well with the change, and I was a Word and Excel power user (I used to train people how to use this software) however I haven’t really been that happy with the MS infrastructure. Like Adobe design products, it’s kind of overkill for small businesses. However, if you have a large business, of course, this will be a different story.

The other set up you’ll want to do right away is to set up a My Google Business profile, especially if you offer services locally. your new website is going to need testimonials and reviews and you want to start creating a good reputation online, as well as putting your services on google. This will help you show up on Maps, so for people looking for Dietitian Newport Beach, you’ll come up in Maps if you have reviesws.