We highly recommend you view the 30-minute video walkthrough here:how to setup a website for your painting business
Creating a website for most people is hard, but for contractors, it’s down right impossible. We’re used to working with our hands and when we can’t get something to work right, we bang on it ‘til it does. Don’t worry though, there are lots of tools out there designed to help you through this process. Here are 5 simple steps contractors can follow to setup their own website:
1. Buy a domain. A domain is like a street address for your website. Google.com, CNN.com, CorkCRM.com, are all examples of domains. The domain I use for my painting company is MDHpainting.com. The easiest place to buy a domain from is GoDaddy.com. Go there, search for a domain that fits your business (the best choice is your business name) and buy it!
2. Now that you’ve purchased the lot (so to speak) where you’re going to put your website, it’s time to build the actual site. The best option for contractors looking for something straight forward is to use a template website. The one I like working with the most is Weebly.com. It’s free forever unless you want to use their premium features.
3. Once you’ve created an account on Weebly.com, choose a website template and fill it out with your information. Simpler is usually better. People don’t need to read your life story, just put some nice before and after pictures of jobs, a few customer testimonials, a little bit about yourself, and give your customers a way to schedule appointments. Note: Don’t freak out, filling in the website template is not hard at all. It’s just like filling in a blank Word document.
4. To allow customers to schedule themselves right into your calendar, check out CorkCRM.com. CorkCRM is a web management tool that does a lot of different things for your business but what’s really cool is this tool that allows you to just copy and paste some code into your website to and make your available appointments magically appear on your website.
5. Now that you’ve built your website it’s time to move it over to the domain that you purchased earlier. This is the part that tells the internet to take somebody to your website when they type in your domain name. (In case you forgot, a domain name is something like MDHpainting.com). This is probably the most complicated step in the process but don’t worry, Weebly will tell you exactly how do this. Just click on the Publish button in Weebly’s site editor and they’ll give you a specific set of instructions.
6. Voila! You’re done. Put your website domain name on your business cards and all of your marketing materials. Now customers can visit your website and learn all about you. Congratulations on creating a website for your business. Getting people to find your website on google is an entirely different topic called search engine optimization or SEO. To get started optimizing your website, this page will tell you everything you need to know
Ready to setup your website? We highly recommend you view the 30-minute video walkthrough here: how to setup a website for your painting business