Everything you need to know before building your website

A landing page is a web page designed with a single goal: getting the visitor to take one specific action, such as messaging you on WhatsApp, booking a meeting, leaving their details or buying. Unlike a full website, it has no long menus or distractions: all the content guides toward one button. It is ideal for ad campaigns, product launches or quickly validating a business idea.

A corporate website is the official site of a company. It brings together, across several pages, who you are, what you offer, your services or products, case studies, a blog and contact details. It works as a business card, builds trust and is the foundation for ranking on Google. It can be built on WordPress, which makes content easy to manage, or on Shopify when you also need to sell online.

An ecommerce site (or online store) is a website where you sell products or services over the internet: it shows your catalog, lets customers fill a cart, pay by card or bank transfer and choose shipping, and helps you manage inventory and orders. It can be built on Shopify, which already includes payments, inventory and shipping out of the box, or on WordPress with WooCommerce, which offers more flexibility. Johnsoft builds stores on both platforms and, in the initial consultation, works out with you which one fits your business best. Unlike a corporate website, whose goal is to present your company, the goal of an ecommerce site is to sell directly.

A domain is the address people use to find your website on the internet, for example johnsoft.com.co. It works as your business name online and is much easier to remember than the numeric address (IP) of the server where your site lives. It is registered for a period of one or more years and renewed; endings such as .com, .co or .com.co have different prices. It should be registered in your name or your company's name and, besides the website, it lets you have business emails such as info@yourcompany.com.

Hosting is the service that stores your website's files on a server connected to the internet 24 hours a day, so anyone can visit it when they type your domain. If the domain is the address, hosting is the plot of land the house is built on. There are shared plans (several sites share one server and cost less), VPS or dedicated servers (more resources and control) and platforms such as Shopify, which include hosting in their price. Your site's speed, security and backups depend largely on the hosting you choose.

Custom software development means software designed and programmed specifically for your business needs, instead of bending your operation around a generic tool. It can be an admin dashboard, an order system, an integration between apps or the automation of a process. It is recommended when existing platforms fall short or when you want to save time by automating repetitive tasks.

An API (application programming interface) is a channel that lets two programs communicate and exchange data automatically, following defined rules. It works like a waiter in a restaurant: it takes your order to the kitchen and brings back the answer without you having to go in. Thanks to APIs, your website can connect to a payment gateway, your store can sync inventory with your billing system, or an AI agent can reply on WhatsApp. In custom software development, APIs are often the piece that ties your tools together.

A WhatsApp AI agent is an assistant powered by artificial intelligence and connected to your WhatsApp Business number that talks to your customers in natural language. It can answer frequently asked questions, qualify leads, take orders or book appointments, following your brand rules and tone, and hand the conversation over to a person when needed.

reCAPTCHA is a free Google service that tells people apart from robots to protect a website's forms against spam and automated attacks. Version 3 works in the background: it analyzes how the visitor behaves and assigns a risk score, without asking them to solve puzzles or tick boxes. It is highly recommended on any site that has contact forms.

Google Analytics is a free Google tool that measures how people use a website: how many visits it gets, where they come from, which pages they view and how long they stay. With that information you can tell what works, what to improve and whether advertising campaigns deliver results. It works with cookies, so its use must be disclosed in the site's cookie and privacy policies.

Google Search Console is a free Google tool that shows how a website appears in search results: which keywords people find you with, how many times you are shown and how many people click. It also alerts you to errors that stop Google from reading or indexing your pages and lets you submit your sitemap. Unlike Google Analytics, which measures what happens inside your site, Search Console measures what happens before people get to it: on Google.

Cookies are small files that a website stores in your browser to remember information about your visit, such as your preferences or usage statistics. They can be first-party (created by the site) or third-party (created by another service, such as Google Analytics). Some are necessary for the site to work and others are used to measure or personalize. Data protection rules require disclosing which cookies are used and, depending on the case, asking for your authorization.