What to Consider when Starting from Home
You have a business idea and now want to move it online. However, you may be unsure as to how to successfully navigate onto the internet and where to turn to.
Let us take a look at where to start, where to aim for and where the best help is to successfully achieve your online presence. 
Planning Ahead
Planning a document to translate your business to potential clients is a good start to successfully building a language for your client. Within this, you will be able to section your website plans and not have everything all muddled together.
Remembering that your clients will be looking at your website for an understanding of your business and service will serve you in adequately breaking down the language of how to speak to them. Have a third party look over how you are communicating and offer feedback on understanding aspects of it.
Identifying a Free Domain
Utilizing sites such as Wix or GoDaddy, you need to check if the domain and URL are available for your ideal company trading identity.
Suffixes such as .com, .co.uk and .net are options for registration, but if you find that all of them are available it is worth spending a little extra to register all domains to prevent identity mixups with anyone looking to register similar entities online.
Identify a Good Web Host Service
To make your website accessible on the internet you will need to find a suitable provider. Fasthosts and Wix among others offer a cost effective service, but you need to be sure whoever’s package you choose is suitable for your business.
Look into reviews on how each is rated on security, response and speed. How a provider responds to downtime in your website is of prime importance to make sure you don’t lose business during any loss of data.
Hiring a Developer
Being a business owner you may want to limit your time and effort on your websites design and maintenance. For those wanting to put their focus on the business side they can hire an external web development firm to handle all aspects from the beginning.
There are many benefits to having your website developed for you, including web hosting provided and programming to ensure you have the website looking and operating how you want it to. The cost of a web developer or web development agency can be weighed against the time you take from your business to concentrate on building and maintaining the site, so it is worth paying for a respected and reliable developer.
Other options are to build your own website from the many free options currently on the internet. However, these options do not necessarily offer many areas for customization and some only offer limited pages.
Figuring How to Trade Through your Site
The aim of your website can fall into two different areas when looking to use the space to sell products.
Shopping cart software is generally used to add to existing websites as an extra, whereas an ecommerce platform lets you build an online store from the ground up as a main focus.
Shopify is an established brand for ecommerce to get you up and running quickly, whilst others like Opencart offer full customization. Reviews and ratings for features and interaction with the software should be researched before committing to an option. Look into how clients have had experience with using the software. 
Be Sure Before Being Live
Presentation is everything and, no matter if your site has been built externally or in house, you need to approve of every aspect before publishing to the internet.
Spelling and formatting of each page should be checked, as well as speed and engagement between pages. Test the website and allow for a third party to play with the functionalities to ensure it moves and feels right.
If you are happy then publish it and prepare to introduce the world to your new identity.
Showcase to Everyone
Having the website is not enough to draw a crowd. Now is the time to let everyone know you have one.
The easiest way is to market on your social media pages like Facebook and Twitter through business group posts and business pages. Make sure that your new URL is present on any marketing materials and business cards.
Traffic to your website needs to be generated through marketing and other options to consider is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which is another service responsive web design companies can provide, such as experts in Stockport Website Development firms have perfected for their clients in Google search results.
Now you have a new website and tools to move successfully into online trading. There are many options to consider and many extra areas you can look into to strengthen your business going forward.
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