More than a decade ago, creating a website involved using HTML, CSS, and Flash. It took a lot of time and effort to create websites way back then and it was difficult if you didn’t have any background on these. It was also expensive to hire someone with a background in IT to create and maintain a website for you.
With the rapid advancement of technology, creating a website nowadays is easy and inexpensive whether you want to setup your own personal website or create a website for your business. You don’t need to be an IT or know how to code. There are a lot of available platforms out there that can help you create and build your website.
Checklist to Build a Website
Before jumping into the steps in creating a website, you need to have a list of the basic things that you need to make a website:
- Domain Name
- Logo
- Business email address
- Website hosting
- Website building software
- Website template design
- High quality images
- Image editor
- Google analytics
You can add more tools as you get more comfortable in creating and maintaining your website.
Step by Step Guide in Building a Website
Choose a Website Building Platform
There are a lot of website builders available in the market. Each of them offer different features that you can use for your website. It’s just a matter of choosing based on your preference, your business needs, and what the website builders offer. You can even use a free website builder. Unless you have a background in website design and in coding, getting a website builder will make things easier for you and will help you save a lot of time.
Website builders offer various plans depending on the customer’s needs. There are platforms that you can use for free. The disadvantage of using free platforms are the limits that they set like for example you cannot create your own domain name and there are limited choices for templates. There are also plans that cater to the customer needs such as plans for creating a personal website or plans for creating a business website.
You can opt to sign-up for a free trial so that you can feel how the website builder works.
Get a Domain Name and a Web Hosting
You need to have your own domain name and a web hosting service in order to setup your website. If you opt for free website builders such as Wix the platform itself is free although you would need to pay to get your own domain name and to get web hosting services.
There are some platforms that include the domain name and web hosting as part of their package but the disadvantage is that your website will be on another domain.
An advantage of availing of a web hosting service is a quicker loading time for your website and it will also have less down times compared to other platforms who offer web hosting for free. These are important factors in driving traffic to your website once your site is up.
Web hosting companies also offer different plans which include the number of websites that you can use, the bandwidth, the website space, the performance, and the number of domains.
Set Up, Edit, and Customize your Website
This is the most exciting part in building your website. Install the website builder either by 1-click installation or by manually installing it. There are website builders that allow you to customize your website like choosing your own templates, background music, etc, while there are website builders that function as drag and drop.
Most website builders offer a good selection of templates and some even offer templates that cater to your business needs. For example, your business is under the textile industry. There are specific template designs for textiles. You can use this template so that you won’t need to code and tweak your website. Most of the templates are free but there are some templates, the more intricate ones, that have a corresponding fee before you can download and use on your website.
If you are creating a website for an ecommerce store, there are also e-commerce website builders available in the market.
Once you choose a template for your website, you can now add content. You can start adding images and descriptions to make your website attractive and personalized. When you are already comfortable using the website builders, you can try and tweak your website as long as you learn how to code.
