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How to Build a Website Using Zoho Sites
An estimated 81% of consumers check out businesses online before choosing to buy from them. And 99% use the web to learn about local businesses.
So obviously, if you operate a small business, you need an online presence.
Fortunately, products like Zoho Sites make building a website for your business easy and affordable. Zoho introduced an update to Zoho Sites in May.
“Our mission has been to make outstanding web design accessible to businesses,” says Ranjitha G, a member of the Zoho Sites marketing team.
“All kinds, irrespective of their background,” she adds.
This last part is important. The prospect of designing a website may fill some small business owners with dread.
After all, a quick search suggests hiring a web designer to create a website for your business might cost anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000.
Numbers like this give any small business owner or startup entrepreneur sticker shock.
And trying to go it alone seems daunting as well. Without knowledge of HTML, hosting or site security, getting your business online creates serious challenges.
Zoho Sites provides one simple solution. Starting for as little as $5, the service offers simple drag and drop design, baked in hosting and security and integration with other Zoho products.
Take a peek under the hood.
Powerful Platform for Business
First, Zoho Sites offers a robust all-in-one platform with everything you need to build your business website.
Get web building tools, domain and hosting from the same provider. This includes Zoho’s well-known security to keep your site and data safe.
Many web building software packages require you to look elsewhere for hosting, domain registration and certainly security.
This means a lot more decisions to make – and possible delays – while setting up your website.
Zoho Sites by comparison offers all these features in one place.
Sophisticated Tools for Marketing
The website you build with Zoho Sites includes marketing tools as part of the package.
Many platforms offer the tools to build an impressive looking website. But your business also needs a way to use that website to attract prospects and nurture leads.
With other platforms, that requires looking for additional plugins and third party tools.
This means more time spent working on your website instead of making sales and building a customer base.
Fortunately, Zoho Sites offers something better. The platform includes all the apps, surveys and forms necessary to attract and convert prospects into leads.
Your sales team takes it from there.
Easy Integrations with Other Zoho Apps
But wait a minute! We say Zoho Sites is easy to use – and comes with apps and tools to make website development quick and effortless. But is it?
Take a look at how easy it is to build a site. Then add integrated apps and tools to turn your new website into a marketing machine.
Zoho Sites offers no-code drag and drop tools to build your site. Ranjitha claims it was easy to master despite her minimum experience with code.
Now you want to attract potential customers, identify their needs and generate sales.
Zoho allows you to:
- Use Zoho CRM to capture prospects and convert them into leads.
- Use Zoho Campaigns to nurture your leads.
- Use Zoho Marketing automation to convert leads.
- Use Zoho PageSense to optimize conversion.
- And more.
Getting all these features often requires small businesses to cobble together a variety of different third party apps, tools and software.
But Zoho Sites puts them all at your fingertips.
Administrative Features Baked In
We saw how Zoho also offers hosting and security services for your site.
The company possesses a well-known obsession with privacy. So relax in the knowledge this same commitment gets applied to your website, your data and the data of your customers.
But also understand the huge burden this removes from your business. You need not spend time searching for a reliable domain registrar, hosting or security services for your website.
Again, this means less time working on your website and more time converting prospects into leads and leads into customers.
But the administrative features of Zoho Sites offer another perk too.
Zoho allows Access Control over your content. This means creating limited access content, member portals and other exclusive features on your website.
It also facilitates the ability to create subscription or paywall options offering yet another business model. And this is an option some Zoho clients are already using, says Ranjitha.
Part of Popular Zoho One Package
You get Zoho Sites as part of the massive Zoho One package.
This business software bundle includes such applications as:
- Bigin, Zoho’s simple small business CRM
- Bookings, for appointment scheduling
- Zoho Social, a social media marketing app
- Zoho Survey, a feature allowing businesses to gain customer feedback
- Zoho Commerce, the company’s ecommerce platform
- Zoho Thrive, an affiliate and customer loyalty program
- And much more.
But Zoho also offers its site building tool à la carte starting at only $5.
Zoho Sites offers plans beginning at five pages, five forms and 500 MB of storage with more pages and storage available for larger websites or blogs.
So Easy It Almost Builds Itself
Some small business owners become intimidated about building a website. As we mentioned, entrepreneurs want to spend their time building their business instead.
This means working on marketing, customer relationships and sales – not trying to figure out web design, hosting and security issues.
For example, many entrepreneurs shy away from web development requiring specialized knowledge of HTML or coding.
After all, this takes time away from what your business is supposed to be about.
But Zoho Sites requires no such specialized knowledge.
In fact, Ranjitha G, part of the Zoho Sites marketing team, boasts she received only minimal coding experience in school. And she used none of it while familiarizing herself with Zoho Sites.
“If I can do it I think anyone can,” Ranjitha explained.
Open the website builder and you are asked to choose the name of your business and your industry. Zoho Sites then asks you to choose a template.
The builder “nudges” you along with window after window asking you to drag and drop features until you’re happy with the result.
While Zoho Sites offers web design made easy for the non-technical, other options exist.
Do you employ a web development team or possess some extra coding chops? Then the website builder allows some tweaking with HTML and CSS to get your site just right.
Zoho Sites By The Numbers
Choose Zoho Sites to build your small business presence online and you won’t be alone.
The site builder hosts more than 200,000 websites (including some built on its free version.) It also hosts more than 50,000 domains.
Analytics and SEO
Building a website gives your business a good start online. But you need to know how many people are visiting. You also need to improve your site’s visibility with search engines like Google.
So Zoho Sites also provides traffic reports and SEO reports to see how you’re doing and help you improve.
Why Zoho Sites?
As a small business owner, you possess plenty of options when it comes to site building tools.
Why should Zoho Sites make the top of your list?
Think about these benefits of using Zoho Sites to create your web presence before deciding on another option.
Zoho Sites gets your website up quicker. This means your website starts bringing in prospects, converting leads and helping you make sales faster.
Zoho Sites offers web building, hosting, domain and security all from one company. The platform also offers integrated apps.
Using another tool may force you to take more time finding the other services you need from third party providers. This slows your time to market and delays you from making those all important sales.
Zoho streamlines your billing with no extra costs. You’ll pay just one bill to run your site. And plans start for as little as $5.
Though you may need a more expensive plan depending on the size of your site, you won’t face additional billing from third party providers. Zoho Sites charges nothing extra for plugins, templates or other services.
Zoho offers integrated apps. These include Zoho CRM, Zoho Campaigns and more.
With Zoho Sites, you get more than just an attractive destination on the Web. These apps and others help you bring in prospects, convert leads and more.
They turn your website from a simple web presence to a marketing and money making vehicle for your business.
You get data privacy and security as part of the deal. These days even small businesses need to worry about data security and privacy for your customers.
With many other web development tools, you need to find a separate vendor to do all this. Many web development platforms simply don’t provide these services.
With Zoho, there’s no shopping elsewhere. The services are all included.
Did we mention support? Think of Zoho not just as your software company. They serve as your IT department too.
Reach out to the Zoho support team if you have a problem. Or consult the huge number of help documents available.
Inside Zoho Sites, you also find in app help. Little question marks in the website builder prompt you to click and get your questions answered.
Chocolate and Orange Combination
Other apps integrate well with Zoho Sites.
“Like a bit of a chocolate and orange combination, I would say,” Ranjitha explains.
For consultants who need to meet with their clients, Zoho Bookings makes things simple.
Your client simply chooses an available date and time with the software. You need no additional scheduling service to run your business.
Providing live chat on your website increases engagement and decreases bounce rate. But many website platforms require you to find a provider elsewhere.
Instead, Zoho Sites integrates with Zoho SalesIQ providing live chat with your web building service.
Finally, collecting customer information helps you identify leads and nurture them. Zoho Forms allows you to embed forms into your website for just this purpose.
Zoho Sites also integrates with a number of third party sites. These include: Mailchimp, Vimeo, YouTube, Google Translate, Google Analytics, X, WhatsApp, Facebook, Bing and LinkedIn.
A Few Case Studies
Finally, Ranjitha shares a few case studies to illustrate how Zoho Sites helps small businesses build websites.
Ivan looks to test a new business idea online. He lacks technical skills and turns to Zoho Sites for help.
Ivan finds the ready made templates, drag and drop design features, visual editor and more a godsend. He uses them to get his website up fast and starts testing his business idea with customers.
Pryia wants to grow her community. She uses Zoho Sites in a completely different way.
First she uses tools within the platform to add additional contributors. This allows her to add team members who help manage content on her site.
Then she takes advantage of Zoho Sites’ social media integration using social buttons to easily share her content. Finally she uses Zoho Sites’ optimization tools to increase her site’s visibility with the search engines. This helps more potential community members find and join her community.
Ryan runs a successful media consulting business. But he believes opportunities may exist in the Middle East for his consulting business too.
Ryan uses Zoho Sites’s Google Cloud Translation integration to translate his Web content into Arabic. This allows him to have a site in English and in Arabic moving forward.
Em runs a realty business. He wants to create a site where he can add new listings and remove old ones quickly with minimal effort.
He uses Zoho Sites’ Dynamic Content feature to pull data from an external source of listings ensuring his content remains fresh.
Customer Feedback
Customers seem happy with the platform and what it can provide.
“Zoho Sites gave me a tool to help me deploy my website in less than 60 days,” says Madhu K. Guthikonda, founder of Ux Tech. “Our website traffic has grown by 30% year-on-year with Zoho Sites.”
Already Have a Website?
Maybe you already built a website for your business. Having used another tool, perhaps you find yourself frustrated.
You don’t like the look of your website. You hired a web developer but despite paying out you don’t feel you got the website that properly reflects your business.
You paid too much and are still paying – for third party apps and services providing data security, hosting, newsletter publishing, CRM and more.
Or your website looks good but really isn’t bringing in sales – or even developing leads your sales team can contact,
Fortunately, Zoho created a team that can help. Just contact them and they can easily help migrate your existing site from WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace or other providers to Zoho Sites.
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