Setting Up Your Business Website - Part 1

03 Feb 2021

What are the key things to remember when setting up a business/project website? Take some time to understand your real needs. Lessons from Scribal’s own experience. Part one of two.

One of the first tasks any new business faces is how to establish a web presence. These days, many consumer-facing businesses start with social media, for instance, a Facebook or Instagram feed. However, for any business whose customers are other businesses, a web presence still means having a website. And eventually, every retail business also has to follow suit.

There are lots of tools out there that make setting up a professional website easier now than it ever has been. Services like Squarespace or Wix, for example, provide superb design, easy content management and rock-solid web operations to provide sites that are fast, reliable and very easy on the eyes. For a business that envisions extensive development of its web site, WordPress provides extended functionality accessible via plug-ins and a huge developer community that can be engaged to build out sites. For the many companies that want their website to primarily serve as an online storefront, e-commerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce make it incredibly easy to set up online shopping. A few years ago, this task would have required thousands of dollars and engaging a professional development team.

A similar set of choices confront established businesses looking to expand their online footprint as part of digital transformation initiatives. We suggest that any business thinking about either creating or expanding its digital assets first take a pause! Take some time to assess the company’s needs. If you don’t have someone technical enough to analyze and evaluate the pluses and minuses of different approaches, consider engaging an expert from outside your organization or designate someone to do the research and become an internal expert.

At Scribal, we performed this kind of analysis for ourselves and realized that:

1. We wanted a website that looks professional and performs well, but is very low cost.
2. We want to retain control over the core technology including the ability to modify the site’s structure and functionality, not just to update content. At the same time, we don’t want site development to consume a significant portion of our working hours.
3. We use open source software as much as possible, not only to keep our own costs down, but to be able to build on work that others are doing in open source software.
4. We want to use technology that others in our field are using and extending to better understand what is happening in the world of software engineering and data science.

The main takeaway here is to know your own requirements and, if you haven’t done anything like this before, seek help from others who have done similar work.

In the next post in this series, I will explain our decision about what to use for our own website and will walk you through the process we went through to create our site.