Why small business owners should understand website basics
Having a beautiful, strategic new website for your small business is great and something I recommend every business sets up as soon as they are able. However, the work doesn’t stop there. Your website shouldn’t just be launched and then never touched again. A website is a living thing, not something that you just set and forget. It doesn’t have to change completely once a month, but it should be reflective of the current offerings within your business and who your ideal clients are.
In this post I’m going to share why it’s important to have knowledge of using and maintaining your website, how to learn if you don’t know where to start, and what the most important things to learn are.
Why you need to be in control of your website
As a small business owner it’s important that you have control and knowledge of all aspects of your business. Of course it’s important to call in the experts to help you when needed (such as a designer, photographer, accountant) but I think that even in those cases, you should at least have some knowledge about everything.
Being the boss means that in an emergency situation, when some calls in sick, goes out of business, is on holiday, you need to be able to find that information or give someone an answer or, in some cases, make the fix and I think this extends to your website too.
Having the knowledge of website basics will give you confidence and freedom to implement changes or tweaks to things within your business at a moments notice. This could be upping your prices, adding a new product, changing what’s included in your service package. Having to arrange to make these changes with your designer can slow you down and derail your momentum.
When you don’t need to control things
Of course, I’m not trying to do myself or other professionals out of their jobs here. I think it’s important to let the experts to their thing and help you in your business. Sticking with the website example (obviously!) having a website designer build your website is going to be the best way to give you a site that is strategic, engaging and increase your sales. However, within that new site, knowing how to make small updates and changes is very empowering as a business owner and something you should start learning how to do.
How to learn website basics & maintenance
Now you are convinced that you need to have a handle on your website basics, you’re probably wondering where or how you can learn.
Practice
Practice is often the best way to learn but can leave you feeling worried about breaking your website or messing up a page. I would recommend making a duplicate of one of your pages, or just creating a blank practice page, so you can test out adding text and images, moving things around the page, and adding various elements.
YouTube
Google and YouTube will most definitely be your friend when you are learning anything website related. I’m sure I’m not alone as a business owner in Googling or YouTubing a question most days! There are so many brilliant resources on YouTube to learn the basics or even very technical aspects of all platforms. It takes some time, but it will be worth it.
Your web designer
Every time I hand over to a client, I create a hidden tutorials page on their website with a full collection of customised tutorial videos walking them through everything that I’ve listed below. I also share resources for general website maintenance and SEO, so they are armed with everything they need to grow and manage their own website.
I want to make sure all my clients feel comfortable and confident with their new website before we part ways.
If this is something that’s important to you, check what post project resources your designer will provide you with before you start the project. Or you can pop me a message here and we can work together!
What you need to know about your website
You don’t need to know or understand every single thing about your website, that’s not an efficient use of your time. But knowing these basics will help you keep your website up to date quickly and easily.
How to access the website dashboard/editor
Knowing how to log in to the dashboard of your website is where you should start. Without knowing this basic information you won’t even be able to go in and make small updates and edits yourself. I would expect that all website designers will pass on some level of access to their clients at the end of a project but do make sure you have been given these details before the project is complete.
How to access your domain & host
This is a slightly deeper level than accessing the dashboard of your website, but these are the things that keep your website online. If you use a platform like Squarespace or Shopify, they are your website dashboard and host, so that’s just one log in. If your website is built on WordPress, your website will have an external host. I don’t think it’s too important for you to really understand the ins and outs of this, but it is important for you to be able to access the host if needed. I’ve had cases in the past when clients couldn’t access their host or domain easily because their designer had moved on or closed their business down without passing the details over.
Related - Simple website terms explained >
A general understanding of what the platform can do
One of the cool things about being a small business owner is that you can try new things in your business whenever you feel like it! Understanding what tools your website platform offers will allow you to take advantage of what you are already paying for without having to go look for another service. For example, Squarespace offers a membership platform built into the interface, along with a scheduler and an online shop. Allowing you to create a free or paid membership within your business, start taking appointments or selling classes, or just open a shop.
If you weren’t aware that your website platform could do these things, you might waste time and money researching alternatives and paying a more expensive premium.
Make minor edits – text & images
I’m not trying to do web designers out of a job with this post. I think the actual design of your overall site and pages is best left to a professional but it’s not ideal if you have to rely on your designer to make even the smallest of edits to your site.
Something about the services you offer might have changed just slightly over the months since your project ended, or maybe you’ve taken some new brand photos and want your site to match your social media posts. Whatever the case, knowing how to jump in and edit the text and images on your site will give you such empowerment over your website and business growth.
Related Posts
Publishing a blog post
I’ve spoken before about how important blogging is for your SEO and website traffic growth, which you can read more about here. Knowing how to publish a post on your website is really important to your business growth and overall marketing plan.
Adding or editing a product
Knowing how to add to your shop will give you the freedom to make spur of the moment decisions to grow your inventory and list something for sale. Again, I’m not trying to lose my job here, because I think the template design for a product is best set up by a designer but having the knowledge to add and list a new product for sale will make your life so much easier.
Change contact details & social media links
This is not something that will likely change very often, but you may update your email address or add an admin member who will know handle general enquiries. You may also add new social media channels to your marketing strategy. This can usually just be added in one place within your website and that change will be reflected across the whole site, so do check this out with your designer or your platforms help section.
Checking your analytics
Check in with your website traffic once a month to make sure you are aware of what content is most popular with your website visitors. Your analytics might be built into your web platform or be handled externally by Google analytics.
Legal policies
Most website designers will create blank or template pages for your legal pages but won’t give you the actual documents. This is because they will be different for all businesses, and as a legal document rather than a design aspect, are out with their scope of work and expertise. Knowing how to update or add your legal policies falls under the same category as being able to make minor text edits, but I wanted to highlight them as it’s something that can get forgotten by business owners. Check out this post to learn more about what policies you should include on your website.
SEO Maintenance
If your website has been created by a web designer, they will most likely have built the overall structure using SEO best practices. This includes page and heading structure, image sizing and naming and page attributes and descriptions. As your business evolves and changes, you should keep on top of all of these ‘built-in’ aspects of SEO, updating them to be in line with your business. I’ve written this blog post covering all sorts of SEO best practices for your website which you should go and take a look at. Keep these in mind when making any changes and updates to your website.
I hope this post hasn’t overwhelmed you but has given you the inspiration to learn how to tackle the website basics and have fun with your site!
If you’d like to learn more about working together on your website, check out the link below.
