How to Create a Website: 5 Essential Tips for Building an Online Presence
“Does my business need a website?” is a basic question you should ask yourself. Should your answer have been anything except “yes,” you should reconsider. You need a website to draw in online clients whether you’re in charge of a large international company with thousands of employees or a mom-and-pop store down the street. If you own a business, losing customers due to an absence of internet presence may be rather costly. It’s not what you desire.
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Thankfully, you have access to a wide range of web hosting options. Selecting one is difficult as it depends on the service’s capacity to meet your demands as well as its overall quality. The Best Web Hosting Services, which showcases our top website development services, is a great place to start.
You also have a ton of alternatives when it comes to actually developing and designing your website. A website may be designed and coded by someone else, or you can attempt to do it yourself (if you’re not experienced, have a look at The Best Courses for Learning How to Build Websites). Web pages can be created offline using desktop software tools or online with an internet service. Or, if you’re a coding wizard, start from scratch and build a website using a plain text editor. How you combine these choices will rely on your abilities, availability, financial constraints, and fortitude.
If you’re prepared to create a website, even if you have little to no expertise, these guidelines will expose you to the necessary tools and resources. Remember that none of these tools will provide you with an idea for a successful website; you are responsible for that. They also won’t turn you become a web designer, which is a different profession from website development. Nevertheless, these programs and services will relieve some of the burdens associated with a lack of in-depth knowledge of CSS, FTP, HTML, and PHP. Now let’s get going.
1. Creating a Blog
An acronym for the out-of-date-when-it-arrived term “weblog,” a blog is a distinct subset of a website that you might be familiar with from its design. New entries usually appear at the top of the page, with previous posts becoming visible as you scroll down. A blog service is an excellent place to start if you need to rapidly create a basic website.
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that runs millions of websites, including Variety, Quartz, and The New York Times. It is a prominent participant in the blog game. Websites powered by WordPress are very simple to set up, alter, and update—ideally on a regular basis. You may give your website a beautiful appearance and a great deal more capability without having to master complex file transfer protocol (FTP) methods, though you can use them if you’d like. There are a ton of free and premium WordPress themes and plug-ins available. For all the information you want concerning the content management system, including the distinctions between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, see How to Get Started With WordPress. Despite being the industry leader, WordPress isn’t the only noteworthy blogging content management system.
Another hugely popular blog site that’s great for shorter, more graphic articles is Tumblr from Yahoo. However, you may discover themes that offer the appearance and feel of a more conventional website for your Tumblr blog. Extra pocket coin is easy to make thanks to Google AdSense’s strong connection with Blogger, a Google property. Modern blogging platforms like Medium and Ghost prioritize content creation and writing above complex layouts, yet they’re quite easy to maintain.
These sites will host your material for free on their servers, but in return, your internet destination will get an ugly domain name, like yourwebsite.tumblr.com. That may work for a personal blog, but for a company trying to get customers to believe in it enough to pay for its offerings, it will appear too tacky.
You’ll need to buy a more conventional URL from companies like GoDaddy or Namecheap if that’s your preference. Depending on if domain squatters are trying to sell a valuable piece of internet real estate, domain name pricing can range from incredibly cheap to extremely costly. You should come up with something succinct but memorable. Please read How to Register a Domain Name for more information.
If you want to utilize a domain that you bought somewhere else, you might have to download the CMS and upload it to your own hosted platform, depending on the hosting provider.
Don’t worry if you’re worried about your website’s mobile accessibility. These blogging systems often allow for the creation of responsive, mobile-friendly websites that are suited for tablets and smartphones.
2. How to Construct an Online Store
Before continuing, let’s talk about e-commerce. Either incorporate e-commerce into your current website or utilize a stand-alone e-commerce provider like Shopify or Square Online. This is an unavoidable step in the website-building process if you intend to sell goods or services. Fortunately, the majority of web hosting companies provide a wide range of integrated applications and bundles.
Drag-and-drop shop builders, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) software for secure financial transactions, and email marketing plug-ins to eliminate the need for you to engage with an outside vendor to market your business are all things to consider when vetting hosts for e-commerce. While there is nothing wrong with hiring an unaffiliated marketing firm, anything that makes life easier allows you to dedicate more time to other aspects of your organization. Take a look at our article on the 6 Things Businesses Should Take Into Account Before Selecting a Web Host for more detailed guidance on how to begin selling products online.
3. How to Use Website Builders to Create a Website
Website builders offer an additional, somewhat quick method of getting your website up and running. These stand-alone services allow inexperienced webmasters to get started fast with drag-and-drop tools and templates. Additionally, some sophisticated web servers have their own site builders or include features from stand-alone businesses.
Although the best options offer surprising amounts of flexibility, they also impose stringent page design restrictions. Therefore, you shouldn’t be able to use one of these providers to construct a poorly designed website. Typically you can get a Mysite.servicename.com style-URL with no commerce abilities for free from one of these services; you have to pay extra for a better URL and the ability to sell. One issue to consider is that if you eventually outgrow one of these services, it can be hard to export your site to a full-scale advanced web hosting like Dreamhost or Hostgator. If you know that’s where you are eventually going, it may be better to skip the site builder step.
None gets the job done better than Editors’ Choice award-winning Wix, though Gator and GoDaddy have compelling offerings. It has a drag-and-drop interface, and all elements of the site are customizable. It doesn’t cost a cent to get started with Wix, but you’ll want to go premium, starting at $16 per month for a domain and scaling upward to $45 per month for 100GB of storage, unlimited monthly data transfers, and priority support.
4. How to Build a Site Using Website-Creation Software
For years, Adobe Dreamweaver has been synonymous with web page creation. It’s gone from being a creator of HTML pages in a WYSIWYG interface to being able to handle programming pages in Cold Fusion, JavaScript, PHP, and other formats. Its liquid layout lets you see how pages look at different browser and screen sizes—even on smartphones and tablets. It’s about as code-heavy as you want it to be.
Dreamweaver is available as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription service. You can get a standalone version of Dreamweaver for $31.49 per month, or as part of Adobe’s All Apps suite, which includes Illustrator CC and Photoshop CC, starting at $82.49 per month.
If you’re on a Mac, however, there’s another option: RapidWeaver. This WYSIWYG webpage editor has full code access and FTP support for uploading pages. There are plenty of built-in templates to get started, all for the one-time price of $79.99. There are numerous choices on the Windows platform. For example, Xara Web Designer starts at $13.99 per month and promises you don’t need to know HTML or Javascript to create sites based on the company’s templates.
5. How to Build a Site Using a Nameplate Service
Blogs are swell, but sometimes you need a simple place to park your persona on the internet for branding purposes. In this case, you can just get a nameplate site, or as we prefer to think of them, a personal webpage (rather than a multipage site). Instead of linking internally to your store or other pages of note as you would with a more traditional web page, a personal site usually has links that go elsewhere—to your social networks, wish lists, playlists, or whatever else is linkable.
About.me is an example of a nameplate service. You simply upload one big photograph as the background for your personal webpage, then artfully overlay information and links to create your digital nameplate. These free sites help you pull images from your social networks or from a hard drive, then provide the tools to make the text and links work unobtrusively, though it really behooves you to check out other personal pages for an idea of what works.
These services typically offer a premium tier that grants more hosting flexibility. For example, About.me’s $8 per month premium package removes the company’s branding and gives you the ability to connect your site to an externally purchased domain.
Artists with major portfolios to show off shouldn’t feel left out. There are a number of personal page/site builders, including BigBlackBag and SmugMug, that display your work just as well, or better, than Flickr or Instagram can.