A Website has become essential for any business or for the purpose of personal branding. It has become people’s address in the online space. People search for products/services through the internet and your brand can pop up on the top only if you have a website. Without it, you’re not going to sell to people across the world. Your area of sales becomes niche. So, what does it take to build a website? Is it easy or tough? Read to find out.
Content Management System (CMS)
Earlier, building a website was a huge task. The websites had to be manually built using HTML codes, CSS, and flash. It required months of learning and remembrance of codes to design a website. Cut to the present, a website can be built in a day or two. How? There are content management systems that are available for use. These content management systems are user-friendly platforms for developing websites and managing your content online.
So, if you want to launch a website in a day or two, it is essential to get the best use of these platforms and launch the sites. The sites, however, would be one-page websites which are just enough for a start. The CMS is the quickest way for web design and development.
Get a Domain and Web Hosting
This is the most important part of creating a website. You may have created one already, but how do people visit you? They need an address, right? That’s where the domain names come in.
Domain name is your address on the website. Your domain would look something like [www.yoursitename.com]. When people enter this into the address bar, it takes them straight to your website.
There are free domain names that are available on the internet too. But these are mostly sub-domains. They are domains that will also contain the name of your host. It would look something like [www.yourname.sitename.com]. It becomes difficult for people to remember and your site never ranks top on the search engine results. The site might have limited options and will kill your professional look.
If you’re building a website for your business, it is always better to buy a domain name. Look for the domain name in the domain marketplace. If your name has been taken already, you could use different TLD’s and search for the domains again. It is always better to name your domain after your company, as it avoids confusion to your visitors.
The data that’s seen on the website has to be stored somewhere. Whenever a visitor visits your website, he looks at multiple texts, images, graphics, etc. All these have to be stored in the server or in a web host. There are multiple types of web hosting configuration. There is a dedicated hosting where the server has data only about your website/organization, shared hosting where multiple websites hold their data, and virtual private server which is a combination of dedicated and shared hosting. Having your own hosting ensures the data loads quickly and the customer doesn’t get irritated on visiting the website.
Most domain marketplaces also sell web hosts. Find the domain marketplace that has good reviews on the internet. Setup an account and buy your domain and your web hosting server. You can also decide to buy a web host from a retailer outside. However, this is advisable mostly for big businesses. They tend to have their own data center and look for sophistication like dedicated servers and VPS Hosting. Also, getting such web hosts will be highly expensive and requires maintenance. For a start, the web host on the domain marketplace will just do.
Set up and Customize your site
Once you’re done with buying a domain and buying a web host, it is time for you to build your website. As mentioned earlier, the website can be set up either through content management system or through HTML codes.
The appearance of the website is essential in driving traffic. A cluttered website will never have hits when compared to a neatly presented website. The decoration matters. The website should look pleasing to the user’s eyes and the navigation should be made simpler. If the navigation looks complicated, your investment goes a waste. At the end of the day, the deeds to your investment are done right only with a regular flow of visitors.
It is thus important to do a rough sketch of how your website is going to look before starting the process. This gives you a brief idea of what to include and to exclude.
The content management system makes things easy for you. All you have to do is select a theme that’s appropriate for your website/brand. On selecting the theme, add and edit pages that you want to include on your website. Typically, these are ‘About Us’, ‘Gallery’, ‘Contact Us’ etc.
Create titles and taglines for your page and add posts or content to the pages where ever it is necessary. Install plugins like contact forms, google analytics etc. Upload your logos, graphics, images, on to your web host and see if its visible on the website.
Check your website has come out just like how you sketched/imagined it to be. Ensure all the data is filled and the images aren’t distorted. See if the website is loading quickly on the browser.
If all that is correct, your website is ready for launch.
