Creating a start-up website: the elements to take into account

When you start a company, you generally need a strong digital presence. Digital lets you precisely reach the people you want to target and automate many tasks to save time and money. Digital presence can come through maintaining your social networks (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn in particular), managing advertising and email campaigns, but also and especially through creating a website.

Your start-up website must be a perfect showcase: it should describe your value proposition, your products or services, and your values, while reassuring customers. So how do you build a start-up website? Scroll gives you the checklist of steps to go through and elements to consider. Also discover our favorite tools to make the task easier.

Build a start-up website in 5 steps

Building a start-up website can be done in a few weeks, even a few days. Generally, the number of pages is fairly limited and the information condensed. The work is therefore lighter than for big e-commerce sites offering thousands of products for sale.

However, there are certain steps you shouldn't overlook. Your start-up site must reflect your company's values, your skills, while attracting users and generating business. How to reconcile all that? With 5 simple but important steps.

Brand identity: a witness of who you are

The first step is to define your start-up's brand identity. If it isn't done yet, know that it's an essential marketing element: your logo, your colors, your fonts must be easily and quickly identifiable, so users can recognize you and get familiar with your company.

Several choices are available: you can lean your brand identity toward your skills, give it a tech feel to highlight your expertise, or orient it toward humanity, support, closeness. It all depends on your target and your offer.

At Scroll, we've supported several start-ups in building their website and redesigning or defining their brand identity. One of them, Remoters, aims to help freelancers find accommodations around the world.

With them, we defined a brand identity that puts humanity at the center. Cartoon drawings of human figures, blue inspiring trust and serenity, call to travel, discovery and connection were the watchwords of this project.

Remoters' brand identity centers on people. What about yours?

A good brand identity must contain at least three elements:

• Logo
• Colors
• Fonts

On top of this, you can add others: keywords to serve as inspiration or guidelines, mood boards to convey an impression or a feeling of what you're trying to create.

Your brand identity will help you build your start-up website. It will also help produce every element tied to your business: products, ads, communications... It's a foundational element that you must define at the start of the project.

Your site's pages: between SEO and user journey

Most start-up sites have only a dozen pages. That's largely enough to present the necessary information: who you are, what you sell or do, your team, a few client cases. Sometimes you also find a blog, and for SaaS solutions, deeper pages that link to the web application. We'll come back to that specific case later.

Given the compact size of start-up sites, it's very important to carefully select which pages you want to create, keeping three elements in mind:

• SEO
• User journey
• Advertising

On SEO, every important page of your company site must aim to capture users through organic search. Optimize your pages for SEO: target the strategic keywords for your business, and optimize your tags and content to rank on those keywords.

The user journey shouldn't suffer: your menu and site structure must stay clear for anyone already on your site. The goal: in less than three clicks, your user must have retrieved all the info they need and can reach out to you. Don't forget to regularly place CTAs (Call-to-Actions) on your pages.

Finally, think about advertising too. Whether you want to run ads on Facebook, Google or any other platform, your landing pages must make users feel they landed where they should. Having several pages lets you vary messages and targets in your ads, bringing your prospects to different places.

Once these principles are clear in your mind, you need to choose which pages to create for your start-up site. The question is delicate and there's obviously no single right answer: every start-up is different and will have its own pages. However, always make sure you have:

• A homepage, summarizing your business and your value proposition
• Pages for all your products or services
• Legal pages: terms & conditions, terms of use, etc.

Other pages can be added, very useful for start-ups:

• References and client cases: as a start-up, you often lack notoriety. Showing what you've done for clients and showing that you have references is a reassurance element for your prospects. You've already done good work and visibly have a good portfolio of convinced clients: you can be trusted.
• Team page: start-ups are often judged by their headcount. Showing your team to prospects also shows your know-how and the specialties you master. A great way to build credibility.
• A blog: the blog can serve multiple purposes. By regularly publishing articles on your core business, you establish your expertise and improve your SEO. A great acquisition and activation strategy.

Finally, one last element about your start-up site's web pages: they must be designed for conversion. Their goal is to turn a visitor into a prospect, even a client. Discover how to build an effective landing page.

Web applications: a special case

Some start-ups will want to put web applications on their site. In a few words, a web application is a tool you can use from a website. Google, for example, is an application (search engine) that sorts and presents the best results based on what you searched for.

Start-ups using web applications are often SaaS: for a subscription, users access the application that lets them solve certain problems.

Hosting and going live

Once your start-up's website is ready, you'll need to put it live. For that, you'll need to think about hosting. Many hosts exist: OVH, Webflow, O2Switch... Compare offers to know which one fits you best.

Webflow, for example, is a tool particularly loved by start-ups: for a fair subscription, you can build, edit and host your site, all in no-code. A valuable time, money and skills savings in a start-up environment.

Promoting your website

Finally, the last step and not the least, is promoting your website. Which channels will you use to get known? We've already talked about SEO and advertising, but even there you'll need to make choices. Will you go with ads on Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn or other platforms?

The choice is yours and will obviously depend on your target and your product. Our advice though: don't close doors, and test as much as you can. Based on the results you get, you can then choose to go deeper or shut down one lever or another.

Tools to build your start-up's website

Start-ups often face similar challenges: lack of time, lack of money, lack of skills. To meet these needs, many tools let you build your website faster, more easily and at lower cost.

Webflow: create, host and edit a website

Webflow has, in a few years, established itself as a perfect CMS for start-ups. A single tool that lets you create an entirely custom site without coding, host it and modify it at will. A simple and elegant solution we use daily with our clients.

Bubble and Airtable: build web applications

Do you need to build a web application? Bubble and Airtable will help you do it. Tools that require some learning, but much more accessible than hard-coding your apps. A clear time saving.

Google Analytics: analyze your site's audience

A must, whether you're a start-up or not. Google Analytics lets you observe how users navigate your site, how they find it and how they use it. Very practical to make improvements or measure the impact of your actions.

Scroll, an agency specialized in website creation

Scroll is an agency specialized in creating websites for start-ups and SMBs. We support our clients at every step of the creation, from defining your need to its execution.

We also build tools and applications in no-code such as CRMs, forms, or other tailor-made tools.

Have a need, an idea, want to discuss? Don't hesitate to reach out: a project manager will respond to bring a solution to your problem, with you.

‍

‍