It’s obvious that you need a website to be in small business these days, but how do you go about organising the content that will be on your website? If you have a business plan (and you should, even if it’s basic), then you can use it as a starting point to develop your website content.

The summary of your business plan is analogous to your home page content. It contains an overview of your business: what you do; what you offer your customers; who are your customers; why they should do business with you; etc.

Your business plan will include a list of the products or services that you offer, with detailed descriptions. You can use this information to form the bulk of your website. It may require several sections to include all the information in an organised and easy-to-find manner.

Throw in a biography (often called ‘About Us’), and all your contact details and there’s the heart of your website. This process can be done in reverse. Putting together content for a website can be used as the basis for your business plan.

A basic website is just a collection of files. They often include photo files (usually jpeg) and web pages (often html), as well as many others. When you visit a website with your computer, the files are downloaded from a remote computer to your computer so you can see them. The remote computer, which could be located anywhere in the world, hosts these files and serves them upon request. The recurring hosting fee that you pay when you have a website is effectively rental for the space that your website occupies on the host computer.