Create a showcase website

A showcase website is a website that enables you to present a business, brand, organization, or product. A showcase website takes is name from commercial showcases, where a physical store puts their items on display. Contrary to an e-commerce website, a showcase website's purpose is not to directly sell products online. But it can still enable you to identify and persuade your website's visitors.

There's a wide range of possible prices, but in general, the price of a showcase website is linked to the amount of computing power allocated to it and the amount of autonomy that you have over the creation of your showcase website. The budget can vary from a few dollars to a few thousand. For a showcase website at Gandi, the price includes your domain name, your hosting, your content management system (CMS) and a certificate SSL.

Some software offers free solutions for creating a showcase website. These free solutions are very successful and are a great option for launching your site risk free. However, these options require compromises that in the long run can undermine your showcase website's credibility, such as in:

• the features or numbers of unlimited pages limited
• data storage and low bandwidth
• the name of your website provider is in the URL
• presence of ad banners on your webpages
• less reactive or support only for an added fee
• no control over where your data is stored

For a credible and professional showcase website, it will need to be quickly upgraded towards a paid version. At Gandi, our web hosting is 100% reliable and secure.

WordPress is the most widely used solution for creating showcase websites, and it is today available with one click with Gandi's all-in-one website packs. Follow these three steps to create a showcase website with WordPress:

1. Determine the goal of your showcase website
2. Plan out your website's sections and layout of your content
3. Choose the size of your Gandi all-in-one pack

You can get your site online instantly thanks to automatic linking of your domain name, your hosting, your content management, your email, and your SSL certificate. Let our intuitive interface guide you through the process. All you'll have left to do will be to choose your website theme (a preset website template) and then customize it as you see fit. And if you get stuck, our documentation is there to help you use WordPress on your Gandi Simple Hosting instance.

Once you're in the WordPress interface, click on Themes in the Appearance tab in your dashboard to choose a graphic design for your showcase website using themes (both free and for sale) provided by WordPress. The Pages tab is what enables you to then organize different sections in your showcase website with WordPress, for example:

• Home
• Services
• About us
• Contact

For specific needs, like translation into multiple languages, a contact form, a tool for measuring your traffic, or one for improving your search engine ranking (SEO), you can install plugins available from your dashboard.

A CMS (Content Management System), is software that enables you to design, manage, and update websites, including showcase websites. What makes a CMS so useful is that it makes website design intuitive, and enables you to build a website without knowing how to code (Javascript, HTML, CSS, etc.) and without having any particular web development knowledge. Joomla and Wix are examples of CMSes. WordPress, though, is by far the most popular content management system in the world. Part of what makes it the most popular are its regular updates, numerous design templates (called themes), as well as an active community. It also has the advantage of being very easy to administer. No matter what your level of technical competency, you can quickly and easily get started creating your showcase website.

If you're not sure what the exact difference between a showcase website and an e-commerce site is, we're here to help you figure out which is better for your business. A showcase website is a communication channel for your company, whereas an e-commerce website is a sales channel. A showcase website is informative and presents a company's business: its identity, where it's located, as well as the products and services it sells are all the type of information you'd find on a showcase website. An e-commerce website (or online store) is a virtual shop where you can sell things online, complete with the ability to make online transactions, pay with several means of payment, and customer interaction. For more information, this article about whether you should create a showcase site or an e-commerce website might interest you.