A successful business website needs only to convey a minimalist look showcasing a nice layout with one or more high quality photos. Other than the looks the main focus of the website should be to load as fast as possible and to be responsive or mobile friendly.
To facilitate a faster load time one should rather limit the amount of media to one high quality photo, up to a maximum of 3 high quality photos (optimized for fast loading) with the business contact details, a map to show the location of the business and a whitelisted autoresponder service to offer a way for the website visitor to sign up for more information. Click here for an example where the name and email address of the visitor is captured.
Once a business owner chose a website template / theme / look for his/her website, the next step would be to register a domain name and hosting. The best option for a small business is a simple professional looking online presence with domain based email bundled with a way of building up a database for their email marketing.
For the most simple setup I suggest either on of the following:
Register your domain name at Website-Email and buy a simple 1 GB CPanel Shared Hosting Account that includes a free basic setup of WordPress with a theme of your choice. This option will get you a free Aweber setup (connecting your Aweber mailing list with your blog) so that all your subscribers will get notified every time you publish a new blog post.
or the other option I would suggest…
Would you rather just want email and a simple fast loading site? I would still recommend setting up a WordPress Blog for the convenience of adding content over time and I would obviously suggest getting your own Autoresponder Account. In this case go ahead and register your domain name at Website-Email and choose their cheapest shared hosting option. You will start to setup your email account(s) and optionally upgrade your hosting speed with the Varnish speed booster upgrade.
Read more only if you need a larger and very fast website hosting option…
Even should you be thinking of going for a super fast hosting setup, I would suggest you use this option as an upgrade from either one of the standard hosting options mentioned earlier.
If you still prefer to get your hands on even faster hosting, or should this be your decision to upgrade your current hosting setup, register or transfer your domain name at Website-Email to get your DNS set up handled for free and then buy your Turbo Linux Shared Hosting, choose “I will use my existing domain and update my nameservers“, type in your domain name and the TLD (.com/.net/.co.za/etc). On the next page you might want to select a dedicated IP address, choose “Yes, Double CPU Cores, Add 1 GB RAM $3.00 USD” and add the “CloudFlare Plan Plus Monthly” option.