I'm planning to launch on iPhone app. In doing so, I am also starting my business; whether personal or LLC etc is still undetermined.
I am in the process of creating a WordPress website for this entity that will have a basic start page and some pages about the product.
I'm not selling a $250 software suite; just a $1 productivity app. How polished and professional does this website have to be? I'm sure I can spend lots of money to make it stunning, do A/B testing and whatnot, but will it make much difference?
What is a reasonable minimum quality for a startup website?
Short:
The website is not that important, you don't necessarily need one in the beginning. Spend your money on marketing.
Long:
I think to have your own website is not that important. It indeed IS important on the other hand to do quite a lot of marketing for your app. The app store(s) are filled with thousands of apps, in many cases there even are a lot of apps for the same purpose. It is really hard to get the attention you need to generate downloads, also because you have a paid app.
You may ask blog authors and app listing sites to review your app and write a post on it, this will cost you nothing but your own time. You can also produce a litte video and post it on youtube or somewhere where referencing sites can link to (which is also for free). Think about a really good description text and screenshots for the store, this will help as well.
Last but not least you can sell your app for an introductory price for a limited time. You may know the "clear" app for iOS, they did a lot of that very well and had a really good start (apple app of the week and so on).
Hope this is somehow useful to you.
Not that important if most people don't see it when making their purchase.
Other than that it is good to have one that looks polished. You can get that a free or low cost CSS template / basic design.
Allow yourself 1-2 days to fill in your content and call it done.
Wordpress is perfect and here are also some other CSS template sites:
http://www.templatemo.com/ http://csstemplatesmarket.com/ http://www.free-css.com/free-css-templates/page1.php
I'm planning to launch on iPhone app. In doing so, I am also starting my business; whether personal or LLC etc is still undetermined.Since you're just starting, focus on the iPhone app itself. The website is low priority especially if it doesn't complement the functionality of the app. Having a simple, clean wordpress landing page based off any number of existing templates should be enough until you are ready to make a substantial marketing push.