You need to:-
- Choose the right domain name: Make sure that if you're picking on that matches your company name, that your name IS actually available first. Check with Companies House (Click Here) for the name you want to use (if you already haven't done so) Then check for the domain name, use somebody like www.ukreg.com or www.123reg.co.uk - either are sound. Others may seem cheaper, but often don't end up being.
- Register it: Make sure you always register your own domain name. If a company registers it and they go bump, you can sometimes struggle to get it back quick enough to protect your rankings and traffic. If it goes offline for too long, you loose all the hard work you've done to it. So you always want to make sure that A) you have a copy of the website and B) the actual domain name is in your control.
Then at this stage you either need a web designer, or you need to know a fair bit about what you're doing. Clearly you want to get traffic to the website naturally and not just by paying to advertise the web address (or domain name) everywhere you can. You want to naturally get hits from the places people search for tilers, and the first page they open will most likely be Google.co.uk (statistically 90 odd percent of all UK searches are Google.co.uk - 2011 - can't remember the source - bbc I think) and not some 'rate this tiler' type website. So you want to rank for search terms typically used by your customers, in your area.
So a customer looking for a tiler in shropshire, will probably search for that 'tiler in shropshire'.
Now this isn't the role of a person or company that does just web design, this is the role of a person or company that carries out 'Search Engine Optimisation', or SEO. And if they don't or can't do that, it's probably worth looking for somebody else. As one person can't always work on anther persons website as easily (and often as cheaply) as just one person doing the lot.
It isn't too difficult to get a website ranking for local search terms providing the term you're looking for isn't competitive. If it is, you need to find more similar search terms that you can rank for. A good SEO firm will be able to sort of guestimate how many lesser popular search terms will equal the very popular search term in number of hits to your website. So in theory you can still get as much traffic short-term, and then the SEO firm can spend time on competing for the popular search term to eventually rank well for that too.
If you're doing it yourself, we have a few threads on this knocking around but mainly in the 'TilersForums Arms' - so try to get yourself in there.
If you're looking for somebody and can hold on for a few weeks; we will be announcing our new web design sponsor (that does SEO too
) and they're doing the lot for £249 one-off fee to set the site up etc, and the hosting fee every year after is about 60 quid. It'll be optimised and you'll be able to edit pages, add more pictures to your gallery, make new pages if you end up doing more technical tiling and want a new page so your customers know. And comes with email addresses and all the usual stuff. Though like I said, it'll be in a few weeks time.