How to Create Good Looking Website for Your First Side Business

You only get one shot at making a great first impression. And first impressions matter a lot!

Think about it. When you stumble on a website that is poorly designed, do you stick around to see what they are offering, or do you leave immediately? Well, guess what? Your customers are the same. That is why having a beautiful and functional website is extremely important for your business success.

However, hiring developers and designers can be extremely expensive, and not everyone can afford that. But what can you do if you don’t know any HTML, CSS or Javascript yourself?

Don’t worry. With the right tools, you can build your website yourself, and add the functionality that you need. Here are those tools.

Use the right tools to design and optimize your website 

Elementor. This is the main tool that you are going to use to create the design of your website. Elementor Theme Builder is a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to create your own custom WordPress theme without any coding. 700,000+ people are using it already! Having a beautiful and polished design will increase your credibility in the eyes of your potential customers and will help you close more deals.

Heroic FAQs. Having a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section on your website is a must. That way, when people have a pre-sale question, they can consult the FAQ first, and only then contact you. This will save you a lot of time on answering questions. The best FAQ management tool is this WordPress FAQ Plugin. Really, do this, because otherwise you will find yourself answering the same questions over and over again!

Captain Form. You also need a way for people to contact you. It might be tempting to simply give your email address, but a contact form is much more efficient, because it allows you to ask important questions (e.g. “What’s your budget?”) in advance. Simply add a wordpress form using Captain Form. That way, you won’t have to ask each potential client the same questions, which will save you a lot of time on the email back-and-forth.

Botsify. Do you use Messenger? Well, so do your clients. So why not have a chatbot that answers their questions via Messenger? And don’t worry, you don’t need to build it yourself. Botsify can show you how to create a chatbot without any coding whatsoever. This is yet another way to save time on answering customers’ questions.

Lorem Ipsum. As you are designing your website, you will need placeholder texts, and writing them from scratch is a huge waste of time. Luckily, with this plugin, you can generate lorem ipsum text with one click!

Fundle Bundle. As you are creating your website, you might want to add a few custom elements (fonts, etc.), just so that your website would look really unique. The most affordable way to do that is by using design bundles. Simply pick a bundle you want, donate the required amount, and start using it! That way you’ll also be supporting independent designers who make these bundles.

Optimize your payments

WordPress shopping cart. You want to provide a way for customers to buy your services right there on your website without having to contact you. Using a shopping cart for this works especially well if you’re offering a productized service. You can use this Simple Shopping Cart. This will make your sales process easier and save you quite a bit of time on the back-and-forth emails.

Invoice Ninja. There’s the exciting part of the business and then there’s the boring part of the business. You can’t neglect the latter, though. Things like time tracking and bookkeeping are extremely important. Without them, your business will turn into a mess, and you will have to spend tons of time on trying to sort everything out. So make sure that you do it right. However, there are so many time tracking and invoicing tools out there, that it might be difficult to choose among them. I recommend Invoice Ninja, an open source platform that is beloved by freelancers and company owners alike, and that has all the functionality that you need.

Extra tip

It’s important to understand that side business should be a side business until it’s making enough money to replace a full-time income. Of course, there are exceptions to that, for example, if you have enough savings to help you survive until you are making serious money with your project. Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry, therefore I recommend you to keep your full-time job until you are ready to go your own way.

Also, sometimes an easiest way to increase your income is to switch jobs, which you can do by polishing up your resume and sending it out to the right companies (these resume templates can help you with that). Remember, running a business is not the only option you have, and often there are other ways to achieve your financial goals!

Conclusion

You don’t need to hire other people to set up a solid online presence for your business. You can do pretty much everything yourself using the tools I just listed. It will save you a lot of money!