A professional website is the first and most important part of marketing your business. Sure, purchasing leads can help you to drum up some business, but even that can be lost if people go looking for your website online and find either nothing, or an unprofessional-looking site.

You might say that a website is the foundation of your marketing push, both online and offline. A website gives you a URL to put on your business cards and other company literature, a place to link to from online marketing articles and advertisements, and a way to generate business by improving your Internet presence.

to this end, it is very important that you find FTP hosting (or SFTP hosting, for secure sites) that will support your professional image. You don’t want free hosting because that will mean either an unprofessional-looking URL or a banner with ads above your site.

It’s also important to make sure your site design looks professional, but not canned. This is a difficult balance to attain. Professional web design is expensive, so many small business owners go with the more affordable option of using web design software to put their site together. Many hosting providers also offer templates to help their clients build their websites. Unfortunately, if you are not careful both of these options can lead to your site appearing rather “canned” and unoriginal.

There are a lot of decisions to make when building a company website. Just make sure you do this part first, before you start trying to market your business or buy leads. Your website plays an extremely important role in creating customers’ first impressions of you and helping them decide whether to work with you!

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