How to create a website: Complete Guide
As the time passes, we find new ways to expand businesses and to achieve success. The digital world is something that has been growing for years, because this world permits the connection between millions of people. One popular choice of many businesses is creating a website. A website is basically a pack of related web pages that are located under a domain name. Having a website can be advantageous, allowing you to connect with people, sell products, services, subscriptions, memberships, use it as a portfolio, schedule appointments, and many others. Now you are going to discover what are the main steps to create a website.
1-Choosing your website builder platform
The first step to create a website is to search for a website builder platform or a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS functions as a user-friendly system to website development and design, allowing the individuals to make changes in the website without using code.
There are a lot of different platforms with different features and each one having their own limitations. The most famous website builder platform is WordPress, the platform that our agency uses to develop websites, which is responsible for the 43.1% of all websites on the internet, according to data from W3Techs. There are a lot of famous brands using WordPress as their website builder, such as Mercedes, Toyota, Vogue, Disney, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others. We are very proud to say that our agency uses WordPress as a website builder platform.
2-Choose your host platform
After you choose your website builder platform or CMS you need to understand that every single website requires a host. You can find a host in a host platform that will store your website on a server. Let’s suppose that you rent a physical store for 1000 €/month, this is not very different, you basically rented space on a server to store your website, normally by a monthly payment that ranges from 2 € too 100 €, depending on your plan choice and the company that you choose. Here is a list of different hosting platforms that are very well known and reliable:
There are a lot of things to take in consideration while choosing the web hosting platform and the plans they offer. Some of the most important factors in a good plan and platform is choosing something that gives you customer support, sometimes things go wrong while developing a website so make sure that you can always contact the customer support team. Other important factors that you should take into account while choosing a plan or a platform is the bandwidth they offer, which is the amount of data that your website can transfer to visitors over a period of time. Lastly, we talk about uptime, which is the percentage of time that your website hosting platform is running, that should be over 99%.
Besides these main factors, there’s also things that you should worry about, like the plan offering a Free SSL certificate (which most do now!), the disk space, the number of websites that the host plan can support, and many others. If you need help with choosing a plan or if you don’t want to worry about anything about this, you can always contact a Web Design Agency like ours, that will solve your problems in a matter of minutes.
Most of the website builder pages don’t include the host, so you are obligated to buy the host in a hosting platform. This happens in almost every website builder page, including the most famous one, WordPress. There are some website builder pages that include the host in their subscription, but they tend to take advantage of this by increasing the monthly price, they tend to have limitations in design, low number of plugins, and others.
What we definitely recommend is that you subscribe to a host plan in the platforms that we mentioned and then use a website builder platform to create your website. If you are interested in recruiting an agency specialized in web design this is everything that you need to do, besides buying a domain (Topic 3). If you want to work independently this is not even a quarter of the work that is left for you, so you might want to see the next topics.
3-Choose your domain and website name
While thinking about making a website you probably thought about a website name. The name is one crucial aspect of marketing and brand recognition. It’s here that your imagination should aid you to create a website name. The name of your website can be the name of your business, if you already have one, or maybe you want to create another one, or use your personal name, there are a lot of options, although the business name being the most used.
After choosing your name, you need to choose and purchase your domain. The domain, also referred to as a URL, is a site’s address on the web (for example: www.frimbleservices.com). Typically, your domain name will have some inspiration on your business name, or even be the same (Business Name: FrimbleServices; Domain: www.frimbleservices.com).
All of the companies that we have mentioned in the 2nd topic (HostGator, Hostinger, Bluehost, Namehero, GoDaddy) sell domains, and some host plans offer a free domain for 1 year.
You should also take in consideration that maybe your ideal domain name is already being used, so you can always make small differences on your name. Let’s imagine that a restaurant is called “LaGostin” and Lagostin.com is already being used, you can change the domain name to Lagostinrestaurant.com.
4-Create your logo
Make your website more attractive and increase the recognition of your brand with a Logo. If you already have a business, you may have a logo already, but if you want to create one you can use free platforms like LogoMakr, yet there are some limitations because you are obligated to credit this platform and you can’t assure that the logo is truly yours unless you pay.
If you want to Recruit Us, we can make an original and unique logo, copyright free, taking in consideration your ideas, colours, and design style.
5-Choose the type of website you want
There are multiple types of websites, including ecommerce, blogs, portfolios, landing pages, business websites, booking, non-lucrative, news, membership, subscription, and many other types of websites. The most common websites are online stores, blogs, business websites, portfolios and booking websites.
1-Ecommerce
Ecommerce allows you to sell products (physical or digital) and services online. A good example of this type of website is Nike. These types of websites are commonly used because they can expand your business into the digital world and let you connect with hundreds, thousands or even millions of people.
2-Blogs
Blogs are growing in popularity in the last few years because they are capable of making money. If you want to know more about what a blog is and what you can do for monetization you can read our post How to monetize your blog.
3-Booking Websites
These types of websites are very common because they have a unique feature. They allow the customer to schedule an appointment. This can be useful if you rent some property for Airbnb or if you have, for example, a dentist clinic, allowing the client to choose the service, doctors, day, and hour.
4-Portfolios
One of the most popular types of websites is the portfolio. These contain personal information and a sample of your work and because of that, they are used to show your work to a company if you want to be hired, or to show it to other people to contact you as a freelancer.
5-Business Websites
This is the most common type of website on the internet. Even if you don’t want to sell products or services online, you may want to grow your brand and use digital marketing strategies to reach a larger audience. You can use targeted advertising for a specific country or city to expand your business, using apps like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and many others.
There are a lot of other types of websites, as we said earlier. If you want to know more about other types of websites and if you want us to create a fully customized website according to your needs and budget, you can Contact Us.
6-Setup and design your website
After choosing your type of website you are going to use the web builder platform to start developing the design. We have mentioned that WordPress is the most popular tool for that. If you are not familiar with web development and design you will need to do a lot of research in page builders, plugins, SEO, website security, and many other subjects.
All types of websites have different functionalities, plugins, design, and different pages that can have an extra price if you are using a website builder platform. There’s a high probability that you will spend more money building your website than purchasing your domain and your host, at least if you want your website fast, secure, efficient, profitable, with a pretty design, and optimized for SEO.
You may have noticed that some websites appear at the top of the list when you search on google. This happens because Google ranks websites based on all of the factors that I have mentioned (Speed, Security, Content, SEO, etc). So, it’s very unlikely that you will appear in the top of the searches if you are developing your own website on your own.
Keep reading to discover what are the advantages and disadvantages of building your website on your own or recruiting an agency to develop your website.
7-Promote your website
After your website is developed, you can’t expect customers to come running at you. It’s true that a Web Design Agency can optimize your website SEO so your business appears in the top of the searches on google while searching for your industry or some product that you sell, but even if this happens, if you want to reach more people, you will need to spend money on advertisement. Even big known brands like Nike spend money on advertising.
So, in case you want to create your website on your own, not only do you have to spend money buying your domain, host, plugins, and other functionalities to develop your website, you will also need to spend a lot of money on advertisements. Let’s not forget that you will need to do intensive research in website development, website design, SEO, and test a varied number of plugins to see what suits you the best. Keep in mind that you will need to spend hundreds of hours researching if you want to make a functional and professional website.
Besides these general functionalities, different websites require different development. In an online store, you will need to customize the shipping details, VAT, products descriptions, payment methods, etc.
In order to advertise your website, you will also need to have knowledge about Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and other popular options. So, in case you want to Work With Us, we are also specialized in digital marketing.
8-Conclusion
Now, you know what are the main topics you need to understand in order to create a website or to hire a Web Design Agency to make your professional website. If you have read through here, we truly recommend that you read our blog post “…” where we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of hiring a Web Design Agency or developing your website on your own.