How to create a small business website?

Your requirements:

• Very easy to use
• You can update the site yourself at any time
• Small- to medium-sized site (about 7 to 50 mainly static pages)
• Domain name and email address included
• You want to be able to use your own corporate design
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Contact form and location map
• Technical support offered by the provider
• Option to offer basic online shopping capability and/or a blog
• Option to include a separate, possibly password-protected section for downloading files
• Cost: US $5–20 per month

Our recommendation:

Jimdo's PRO and BUSINESS packages cover all the requirements listed above. For details about their pros and cons please take a look at our full Jimdo review.

Alternatively, Weebly Pro is also worth checking out. You can find out more from our Weebly review.

Our tip for larger company sites

Perhaps you also require functionalities such as:

• Membership pages with login and different levels of access for different customer groups
• Lots of variation in page structure
• Professional SEO

Squarespace offers more options to customize the design to your individual needs and to optimize your site for search engines. However, the system is more complex and takes a little longer to learn. Also, Squarespace does not yet offer domain hosting and email forwarding. So you will need an external domain host for this. Check out our Squarespace review to find out more.

Free eBook
To get you started, please feel free to download our eBook "Website Creation for Absolute Beginners", completely free of charge. This will help you plan your business website and get things right from the outset.