Last week, as part of the ongo­ing Westchester Entrepreneurial Workshops pre­sented by WEDC, the Women’s Enterprise Development Center, I talked about mak­ing web­sites with a room­ful of entre­pre­neurs. I asked the ques­tion if you’re start­ing a new busi­ness, launch­ing a prod­uct, or even start­ing on new job hunt, wouldn’t you want to put up to a web­site as quickly and cheaply as you pos­si­bly can? Here are the steps I recommended:

Step One: Buy a URL

Acquire a URL or “Domain Name” such as www​.YOURBUSINESS​.com. This is your busi­nesses’ per­ma­nent address and you can take it with you when you move or upgrade your web­site in the future. Ideally, you should own the name of your busi­ness and it should have a .com suf­fix. If your busi­ness is local, instead of (or in addi­tion to your city name) add the city name and a descrip­tive text to your domain, such as “WhitePlainsLawyer” or “MtVernonPainting.” You can buy your URL at a domain reg­is­trar such as GoDaddy​.com. (If you need help with that name, see my post on tools for nam­ing your domain.

Step Two: Brand Your Mail & Business Services

Now that you own your web name, you can drop that @aol.com or @gmail.com from the end of your email address and replace it with you@​YOURBUSINESS.​com. Of course you can get email ser­vices through your domain reg­is­trar. But do set your­self up with Google Apps for Your Domain, and you’ll get more than just email – you’ll get google docs (a word proces­sor, spread­sheet, online draw­ings and pre­sen­ta­tions), google voice (an online tele­phone and video ser­vice) and even sim­ple free web­sites, and it is free or min­i­mal cost.

Step Three: Creating a Landing Page

Now that you have your domain, you don’t want poten­tial cus­tomers going to a “com­ing soon” or “under con­struc­tion” page. Instead, set up a quick and easy home page at About​.me or Flavors​.me. You can use these pages as a per­sonal land­ing page or as a land­ing page for your busi­ness. Think of this page as per­sonal bill­board, and put up all the infor­ma­tion that some­one needs to find you – a short descrip­tion of your ser­vices, your email and your phone num­ber. Use this page to link in your pro­fes­sional social media pro­files too. Pay a few dol­lars to get the pre­mium ver­sions of these ser­vices so that you can use your own domain name.

Step Four: Be Your Own Webmaster

If you need more of a web­site, con­sider an inex­pen­sive blog site for your busi­ness. With a hosted blog site, you won’t have to worry about get­ting a “web host” or a “web mas­ter” … just sign up and cre­ate a site. I like Squarespace​.com (with the Caveat that there are only a hand­ful of tem­plates for non-​designers), or Wordpress​.com. Both sites have a free trial, so you can try them out by cre­at­ing a site at www​.YOURDOMAIN​.square​space​.com or www​.YOURDOMAIN​.word​press​.com, and when it is ready you can upgrade the ser­vice (Squarespace starts at $14/​month and Wordpress starts at $18/​year) to use your own domain name.

Step Five: Add E-​Commerce

If your busi­ness is an online shop, then you can set up an e-​store in min­utes with a built-​to-​order e-​commerce. Check out Goodsie​.com (from the same peo­ple who make Flavors​.me), or if you have a large, com­pli­cated store, con­sider a solu­tion like Bigcommerce​.com. If you have tons of prod­ucts, get help col­lat­ing them with a ser­vice like Smartsheet with Crowdsourcing to get many hands to help you col­lect your prod­ucts. And if you only have one or two prod­ucts, you can sell them from any site using the ser­vice from e-​Junkie.