How to build a small business website with blogger - for business owners

With advancements in technology today, using technological products or services is become easier than ever. Also, as a small business or start-up you may not have the initial budget to handle your website needs. So I decided to share my accrued knowledge on how a small business owner or start-up can leverage on the features provided by blogger to meet his website needs.

What do I mean by small business website?

We need to get aligned on exactly what I mean by a small business website. In essence, this is a website that meets the basic online presence needs of a small business. A place on the World Wide Web where potential customers to your business can go to learn more about your products, services and how to get in touch with you and talk about the business on social media. 

With that said, a small business website is one that has the following pages and functionalities:

• A Home page
• An About page to talk about the business in general
• A Contact page to allow for sending of mails and to contain other contact information
• A Products/Services page
• A News section for updates and interaction with customers in feedback comments.
• A business domain name

Understanding the blogger platform

To achieve the above, you need to have a good understanding of Blogger and the various things that you can get done on it. 

Blogger is primarily an online blogging content management system owned by Google and made available for free to users with a Gmail account. You can create multiple blogs with a single Google account and all blogs you create are made accessible to internet users on a subdomain of the Blogger blogspot.com main domain. You have the option to use a custom domain name.

Blogger is available online as a service, you can not download it to work locally on your computer and upload files latter on. IT has a feature rich dashboard that makes life simple for creating editing and designing a blog. You pay nothing for hosting the blog. It is hosted for free by Blogger and does not force ads into your blog/website.

Blogger Dashboard

We are going to look at how to create a blog and transform it into a small business website by using the features as shown on the above dashboard.

Creating the required pages for the website

Let us create all the pages mentioned above.

1. Click on pages on the left column of the dashboard then on the new page button that appears above the resulting view. Enter the page title, Just put a placeholder text as the body of the page. 
2. Click on Options on the right column of the dashboard and select Don't allow under Reader comments. This means that website visitors should not have the possibility to comment on your website page. This is only important for a post and not a page so we disallow it. 
3. Input short and concise names as page names because this would affect the link generated for the page and can influence Search Engine Optimization. Click Done to save the settings and Puslih to create the page and publish it on the website. 

Repeat steps 1, 2, and 3 above for the other pages (About, Contact, Products & Services, Blog) and when done we can move to the next set of activities. 

Next:

How to structure and design a website on blogger.