There are many ways to create a website, and you can do it for free, if you don’t mind keeping the name of the website creator on your domain name. It is by far the most popular method. However, thinking about building a site is one thing, and actually doing it is another. There are countless blogs and videos online that demonstrate how you can create a website in less than 30 minutes.
Well, they are all correct in their own way. But the most important thing that you need to know before creating a website is: what do you seek from a website? The website is like your home on the internet or the office if you are using it to expand your business to the realms of the internet. Today, With the help of this article, we are going to show you how you can create a website. We will also highlight all the things that were important during the creation of the website.
Top Five Reasons to Create a Website
Before we begin, let’s briefly recall the main benefits of having a website and how it can help you shape your business.
Credibility
The youth is using the internet, most of your customers are online, and they want to make a purchase sitting in their homes or wherever they want. In that case, having a website becomes essential as it gives your customer the ease to make the purchase anytime, anywhere. A lot of times, when you get a call from a customer, they will ask you for a website to go through the offerings that you are providing.
It is true that more than 30% of the population don’t even consider something a business if it doesn’t have a website. As a result, if you want to make sure people do take your business seriously, you need to have a website of your own.
Business is Easily Accessible with a Website
When it comes to making a purchase, most customers prefer to do so online and compare costs with other companies offering similar services. People desire a company that is easy to get in touch with and can be reached at any time. There is no downtime on a website because it is always online. As a result, a user can buy your goods or service at any time of day or night.
Better Understanding
With the help of a website, you will be able to create a solid and long-lasting relationship with your clients and customers. When you are building a website, you are going to make some crucial decisions that are based on how users will see your website from their end. You will work on things that make your users want to stay on the website for as long as possible. A great user experience can do wonders, and it could be the difference between selling the product in massive amounts.
Take the Benefit of Google Search
When you have a website, you can get it from Google’s search listings, and this makes it easier for your customers, and even online customers, to find your business and offerings. If your business is present on Google, it will have reviews, and with reviews, a client or customer can check whether you are able to satisfy the needs of your customer or not.
With the use of proper SEO techniques and content creation, you can be at the top of the Google search results. That means you will get tons of new customers online who are searching for the services or products that you sell.
Website is Important for Online Marketing
The traditional forms of marketing have gone now; there used to be print releases, print ads, and flyers as well. But they do cost you a fortune, and you don’t have enough information as to whether they have worked in your favour or not. In addition to this, the results from this form of marketing will never give you the satisfaction that you will receive using online marketing.
On the internet, websites can be the first point of contact, or they could be some other social media platforms. On the other hand, the endpoint is always the website; that’s where you want most of your customers to visit, as it is the only place on the internet that is of your own, and you are not dependent on a platform to provide you with the earnings.
How does a Website Work?
The website works in a much simpler way than you can imagine, but most people make it look quite tedious in order to overwhelm the person who is looking to understand how it works. Well, a website needs to have five essential components, and those are:
- A Personal Computer: In order to access or create a website, you need to have a personal computer. These days, even a smartphone can be considered a computing device.
- Browser: This is the software that allows you to access the website you want to visit.
- Internet Connection: The connection to the world wide web is something you must have to see the contents of the website when it loads. Having the first two things and then not having the internet connection is of no use at all these days. The internet connection is provided to you by the ISP that works in your country or region.
- Web Server: This is also a computer, but here your website is hosted, and you can easily access it using the internet.
- Router & Switches: These are the combinations of hardware that are used for sending and receiving requests from the server and the computer.
The website works on a client-server system, where the client is connected to the website using a remote computer. The server is the one that has the contents of the website hosted on its servers. When a user wants to access the website, they will send the request for it from their computer using the router and ISP. The ISP will transfer the request to the correct server’s ISP, and then it will relay the information to the server.
The server has to be constantly connected to the internet so it can be used to serve up the pages to the visitors who are trying to access the pages. When a server receives a request, it looks for the requested document in the storage and, once found, returns it to the web browser. On the other hand, when a web page is requested, the server usually logs in the IP address of the computer that is making the request.
For Example
- Suppose you enter the URL into a web browser; presumably you type in Google.com.
- The request for website access is routed to the server via the Domain Name Server (DNS).
- After that, DNS will return the IP address for the specific server which is hosting the website in its storage, such as 68.178.157.132.
- Now the browser will ask for the web page from the web server via IP address specified by the domain name server.
- Finally, the web server will return the web page to the IP address that has been requested for it. The page could contain links to other websites as well on the name server. These could be images, GIFs, and even videos. All of these will be a part of the request sent by the browser.
- In the last step, your browser will collect all the information that it has gotten from the request and present it on your display.
Step by Step Guide to Create a Website
If you are looking to create a website and have it up and running in the shortest amount of time, then the steps given below must be followed. These steps will help you to get your own piece of internet real estate in less than an hour.
Step 1. Find a Hosting Platform
Before you look for a website builder, you need to secure a domain name and hosting storage for your website. You can use Hostinger, GoDaddy.com, and more to get the domain name along with the hosting service. You can choose how long you want to keep the domain name and the hosting. Don’t worry, you can go with a one-year plan and then extend it once you are sure about the website and its usage. Create an account with one of these hosting service providers and start looking for a domain name that can represent your business or work.
Most of the time, people tend to go with the domain name that matches their business. For example, a company like Tesla that creates electric cars needs to have a website with the same name. Otherwise, it will be hard for customers to associate the website with the business.
A domain should be easy to spell so that people can remember it with ease. Moreover, it is best if you are able to find a.com,.org, or.net. Apart from this, if you are creating a website to be used as a portfolio or a personal blog, Then it is best to go with your name plus what you will be doing with the blog. Lastly, don’t include any special characters or even numbers. This will make your URL look weird, and it will make it harder for people to remember it as well.
Step 2. Find Appropriate Web Creation & CMS Web Application
The very first thing you should be doing is finding the right website creation application for yourself. It could be WordPress, Hostinger, Wix, and more. You can choose any of them, but if you are a newbie, then going with Wix is a better option. WordPress is the easiest if you want to stick with the old methods of creating a website.
Create the login, and once you are done, the exciting part of creating the website starts. Here you have to choose from a different number of templates and layouts for your website. Layouts are also called themes, so don’t confuse yourself by thinking themes are something you have to choose down the line. You can change it later on if you like, but for now, choose the one you want the most and carry on forward.
Once you are done choosing the theme, you will be shown a checklist that contains all the information about your website. It will include the domain name, the location of your website, which CMS you are using with the website, the admin email for the website, and the name of the theme of your choice.
After you have checked that all the information is correct, click on the Next button. The processing will take a few minutes as it is going to attach everything together, that is, your domain name, web hosting location with the theme, and the CMS that you have chosen. Once it is done, you now have a website that can be viewed by others on the internet.
But, the website as it is now might look a bit bare or empty. So let’s try to make it more lively using the CMS that you have opted for in the first place.
Step. 3 Design your Website
When you are in the CMS of your website, you get to change a lot of things, and you can edit how the different buttons are going to perform on your website. In addition to this, you will also see how other plugins will help in making your website look better and enhance the user experience. There are thousands of themes for you to try and more than ten thousand plugins that you can use with the website to make it stand out. In this step, you are free to explore as much as you want and experiment with your way to find the best results for your website.
But keep in mind that you don’t have to spend hours and hours of your time on this step. You can do the bare minimum and then move on; that’s because you can always come back later and make changes to it according to your requirements. Every theme comes with its own set of colors, menus, widgets, and more to give your site an overall makeover. Below, we have described some of the essential aspects of themes that you should always look for before installing them on your website.
- Site Identity: This particular part of a theme will let you change your site’s title as well as the sub-head and the tagline. In most cases, this is the place where you will be uploading the logo of your website so it can be seen alongside the URL box. In addition to this, the logo will appear in new browser tabs when users visit your website.
- Colors: The colour of your website or theme must match the colour palette of your business. For example, if you already have a logo that has a prominent blue color, then it is best to include the blue colour in your website’s theme to make the whole thing more natural to the customers.
- Menus are the methods that are used by the individuals who are visiting your website to navigate from one page to the next. The person should be able to understand the menu and use it according to their needs. As a result, menus need to be clutter-free, and they must show the correct information as to where they are navigating the users.
- Widgets are the optional parts of your theme; they are different sets of tools that can be placed throughout the website to make your website more interesting and attract the interest of users. These could be the search bars, calendars, important event dates, and more. You don’t need to add a widget to your website, but in some cases, they can do wonders. So, depending on how you are going to use the website, their mileage may vary.
- Top Bar: This will provide you with the ability to customise the top area of your website. Here you can provide the social links, buttons to the other pages that work as navigation, and more.
- Header: The header is an important part of your website; it is where you can add images and logos, as well as change the font and colour scheme. It can help you do tonnes of customization for your website with ease.
Step. 4 Build the Architecture
A website is like a home; once you have done the above three steps, your home is now made. It looks complete from the outside, but inside there’s still a lot of work that you need to do. To build the website’s architecture, you need to work on the web pages, and these will be the documents present on your website that can be accessed by users visiting your website.
Think of these pages as the rooms of your home, and each page provides a specific set of information. Given below are the types of pages that you can use on your website to make it user-friendly.
- Home Page: These are the pages that the user is going to see first when they visit the website. So take your time with designing and writing the content for them. These pages will help you retain customers for a much longer time on your website, leading to an increase in ranking.
- Contact Page: From here, a user can get in touch with you with various means of communication. You can provide your email address, phone number, physical address where you are situated, and a number of social media platforms where they can get constant updates about the work you are doing.
- About Page: This page is about expressing yourself to the users who are new to your website. Most of the time, it should be a part of your homepage, meaning when a person scrolls down on the home page, they will get to the about section of your website. Here you can tell your brand story, what you are doing, and why you are doing it.
- Online Store: An online store is a website that sells something to users who visit it. If you have something to sell, this is the page where you show it to the buyer. It could be pretty significant depending on the type of business you are running.
- Blog Page: This is the page where you will be keeping all your blogs. A blog is a piece of information that is published in the form of articles so that readers can go through them with ease.
Note – Try to make your web pages work dynamically, and a static page looks suitable only for a few days. As a result, you require a website that is constantly updated based on the most recent post you uploaded. This will make your website look fresh and allow users to come back to it again and again to see the newest content.
Step 5. Create Compelling Content
Now, once you are done setting up the web pages for your site, it’s time to fill in the content on these web pages. The end goal of this step is to create unique content that your viewers will love to see and share with others. Content is like the decor of your home, and you want to make it look the best so whoever comes to your home feels awestruck the moment they step inside. To create the right content for your site, you need to find the voice of your brand or what message you want to give to the users. Apart from that, you can target each of your personas along with the map of content based on the client’s lifecycle.
If you are selling something, you should create helpful content describing the benefits of using that specific product and how it can make life easier for those who purchase it. You need to describe the product in the most straightforward and yet most efficient way possible.
Use the correct language to draw the attention of your customers, and while you are at it, make a content schedule for the website. This way, your website will be constantly updated with new content, resulting in an increase in SEO ranking.
Wrapping Up
So these are the 5 essential steps that you need to follow when you are creating a website on your own. When you start making a website, it may look tedious, but follow these five steps, and you will be done in no time. Step 2 and Step 5 are the ones you have to work on constantly. Other than these two, the remaining steps 1, 3, and 4 should not be changed continuously or updated as they are the building blocks of your website and create the connection between the website, CMS, and the website hosting of your choice.
Before we sign off, we would like you to give one more tip, and that is to go with the best web hosting service when you are creating the website. Even though it is a bit expensive, it is an essential part of the whole website creation process. An excellent web hosting service can easily make or break your user’s experience, resulting in high bounce rates, short visit times, errors in loading the page, and more.
As a result, be open to spending a little bit more on web hosting services and go for the longest plan possible to save a lot. We hope this article has helped you crack the code of creating a website. Now don’t waste a single moment and start building a website of your own now!