Nowadays, a website is essential to any business. Be it for a new start-up or an established company, a good website helps make your product or service known to the market. Through a website, you’ll be able to tell your audience who you are, what you can do or provide, and a means for people to reach out to you. Not every business may have a physical establishment anymore, so making your online presence known through a website may not only attract potential clients or customers but also contribute to the success of your business.
Creating a website may sound like a daunting task at first, but it needn’t be. Whether you’re building one through a content management system, or are coding your own website from scratch, here are some basic steps for you to create your own website.
A website can provide the public with general information about your product or service, or be a platform for you to sell your products directly. Knowing how your site would function can also help determine what other features you may or may not include on your site.
Your domain name is the unique address to your site and your brand. It’s what you share and promote with, and is what users and potential customers remember you by. Choose a domain name that makes a good impression, but is also descriptive and easy to remember. Remember to keep your domain name short, avoid using obscure hard-to-spell words, and refrain from using numbers and hyphens. Make sure your domain name doesn’t contain registered trademarks and doesn’t overlap with already existing ones to avoid issues in the future. After deciding on a domain name, make sure to get it registered and secure a web hosting service.
A website hosting service offers the technology and services that allow users to post a website on the internet. Your domain name is connected to a web hosting service so that when users type in the name of your site, they are connected to a server that then connects them to your website. Every website needs a server to store all its data that should be accessible to the public at any time, and depending on the type of service you choose, a web hosting service can cost anywhere between $2.49 – $730/month. Different web hosting services cater to different needs as well as different levels of traffic your website encounters. Shared servers are the cheapest option and cater to low-traffic sites, but also mean that your site will be sharing a server with multiple other sites, VPS or virtual private servers are a step up from shared servers, but with this service, your site will be sharing servers with fewer sites, or dedicated servers that are entirely dedicated to your website, but work best for bigger more heavily visited sites.
Besides providing your site a serve, a good web hosting site should be able to provide your site an email account, have good server security and FTP or File Transfer Protocol, be easily accessible, and should be able to provide you with support through chat or phone.
A content management system helps you create and manage content on a website without having to write a code from scratch or needing the technical knowledge to do so. A CMS takes care of handling the basic structure of your site, allowing you to focus on other important details like the content of your site.
Besides having a good landing page, your website should also have dedicated pages for the different things you’ll feature on your site. Your homepage should make visitors aware of what products or services you provide within seconds of scrolling. Instead of having all your content in one page, an effective website should have separate pages dedicated to different parts of your site, for instance, a page for your products or services, an about us page, another page for a blog, and a page for your contact details or how customers can reach you. Good content on your site should also be backed up with an engaging and memorable user interface, leaving users with a good impression of your site, making them more likely to visit again.
If you’re selling goods or products on your page, you’d want to choose an e-commerce platform to modify your site to function as an online shop, help you manage products and inventory, as well as accept payment, and process shipping.
Once you have your site set up, you’d want traffic directed to your site. A means to do so is to leverage SEO to increase traffic and visibility to your site. Practices like keyword identification, having unique content, good social media metrics, and having a mobile-friendly site, among others, affect the visibility of a website in the results of a search engine, and increase organic search visibility so your content can be found easier. Besides having SEO strategies in play to increase traffic to your site, make sure your content is not only current and regularly updated, but is also of good quality and unique.
Maintaining a site also includes monitoring data from webmaster tools like the number of visitors to your site, average time spent on site by visitors, number of page views, and other information that can help improve your online presence. Creating a website is just the beginning. A good site should be curated, regularly updated, and monitored to ensure a better chance of success.
About The Author:
| Chatty is a freelance writer from Manila. She finds joy in inspiring and educating others through writing. That’s why aside from her job as a language evaluator for local and international students, she spends her leisure time writing about various topics such as lifestyle, technology, and business. |
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