How To Create A Website: What You Need To Know
One of the best ways to tell more people about your business is to create a website. This allows both new and existing customers to learn more about your business, and check out any products or services that you offer. In this post, we’ll go over the steps to create an online presence, which includes:
- Registering a Domain Name
- Choosing a Host
- Installing a Content Management System
- Designing and Creating the Web Pages
Keep reading to learn more about each of these steps, or click on the button below to learn about how we can help you make your online destination!
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1. Domain Name REgistration
Before you create a website, you have to choose a name for your website, which may not be as straightforward as you think. One potential issue is domain name availability, common words and phrases have most likely been purchased already. This means that “yourcompanyname.com” may not be available for purchase. Fortunately, alternate domain extensions of your desired URL may be available. So if the “.com” version of your desired URL is not available, “yourcompanyname.net” might be. Some domain extensions may not be applicable or appropriate for a business website, so use caution when choosing an extension other than “.com”, “.net”, and “.org”.
You can check any domain’s availability and the price atname.com
If you still aren’t able to get your business name, there are some creative workarounds to consider. One example is to attach the location of your business to the URL, so something like “yourcompanyname+city.com” may be a good option for your business.
2. Hosting your new Domain
Now that you’ve chosen the name of your website, you must now choose a place for your site to live online. There are several factors to consider when choosing where to host your site, including:
- Bandwidth
- Security
- Backups
- Network Uptime
Let’s take a closer look at each of these categories
Bandwidth
This represents how many users can access your site at the same time and how much data is being transferred. If your site is only a few pages targeted at a niche community, then its bandwidth requirements most likely won’t be that large. On the other hand, if your site consists of hundreds of pages, and sells products to lots of people, then your site is going to need more bandwidth. If your site has large, high-quality pictures or video this makes a difference in how many users it can support using the same amount of bandwidth.
Security
You and your customer’s data is important and needs to be treated as such. Features like SSL Encryption are implemented to make sure that no outside party can monitor your customer’s interactions with your site. Make sure that this is standard with your hosting. Some may charge for SSL, but many hosting services include this in the package.
Backups
How often your site is backed up, and where that backup is stored, are important things to keep in mind when searching for a hosting provider. The more up-to-date a backup is, the quicker your site can recover from equipment failure or sabotage. Backups are like your insurance policy for your website just in case something catastrophic happens.
Network Up-time
This is usually represented as a percentage, guaranteeing that your site will be available to access 99.9% of the time, for example. It’s an overall representation of how quickly your hosting provider will work to rectify any issues on their side.
3. Choosing a Content MANAGEMENT system (CMS)
Now that you’ve chosen a hosting provider for your website, you now need to decide what tools you’ll use to create it. We recommend using WordPress, which you can learn more about at WordPress.com . One of the reasons WordPress earns our recommendation is that it’s an open-source platform, which means that it’s free to use and modify by anyone. Because of this, WordPress is the CMS of choice for over half of the websites on the internet today. Another selling point is its vast library of plugins, both from WordPress itself and third-party developers, so if WordPress itself doesn’t have a feature you want, chances are there’s a plugin for it.
Part of this process is choosing a theme for your site. The theme is the overall look and feel of your site, which includes colors, fonts, and other design choices made by the theme developer. Below are some themes and theme creators that we recommend:
4. designing your new website
After you’ve chosen your CMS, you can now begin creating the pages of your site, such as the homepage, “Contact Us” page, and anything in between. it’s a good idea to sketch out each of the pages on paper before you create the pages themselves. This process will let you easily make adjustments to your ideas, without having to both learn the new CMS design process and make changes to your vision. Click the button below to look at some WordPress resources to help you get started.
Once you’ve created, edited, and published all your pages, your online destination will be open for business!