Carving Out Your Niche: The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Building a Website

Wondering how you can start building a website?

Trying to build your online presence?

If the process of building a website is new to you, then you may not know how to get started. Fortunately, starting a website is pretty easy as long as you know a few simple steps for getting started out on the right foot.

Below we’ll give you our complete beginner’s guide to building a website from scratch.

1. Choose Your Domain Name

The first thing you’ll want to do when building a website is to pick out your domain name and to see if it’s available. You can easily check the availability of any domain name using a domain purchasing site such as Namecheap or Godaddy.

It’s important to choose a site name that aligns with your business or brand but that is also easy to remember. It should be fairly short and you should also avoid using hyphens and other punctuation. You should also avoid spelling words in your domain name in a different way that people won’t be used to.

2. Get a Host

Once you have a memorable domain name you then need to choose a website host. Some website providers offer both of these services and you’ll be able to get both a domain name and a web host in one place.

There is a lot to think about when getting a web host, but most of all, you should aim to find one that is reliable and that allows your site to load quickly. A great web host will promise over 99.9% uptime as well as unlimited storage space.

Additionally, you’ll also need to decide between shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and VPS hosting.

3. Pick a Platform

When getting started with building a website you also need to decide what platform you’ll want to use.

WordPress is often the go-to choice for many website designers but there are many options out there. If you’re a novice to building a website you may want to choose a platform such as Squarespace which you can use with the help of Means-of-Production. Squarespace is easy to use and easy to tweak without much technical savvy.

Other platforms include Joomla, Weebly, and Wix, among others.

Additionally, keep in mind that If you’re creating an e-commerce site you’ll want to look into a platform that is specific to that, such as Shopify.

4. Start Tweaking

It’s finally time to start building your site.

You’ll want to spend plenty of time tweaking your website design, making it easy to navigate, and adding content. If you’re a business you’ll likely want to include a home page, service pages, an about page, and a contact page.

Make sure that your website is mobile friendly and is also quick to load.

Ideally, you’ll also have a blog page on your site. A blog can be a great tool for connecting with your audience and adding content to it regularly will help improve your SEO and allow you to get more website traffic.

5. Test It Out

An important step to remember when building a website is the testing stage. Don’t just create your site and launch it without taking a look at it from a visitor’s perspective.

When building a site, make sure that you double check everything before it goes live. Work on your site design and structure and then check it. Then, tweak it some more.

Make sure that your site’s navigation works as it should and that there aren’t any broken links. Also, look for punctuation and spelling errors.

Once you’ve tweaked and tested your site to perfection, only then is it time for the next step.

6. Publish It

The next step to building your website is to hit the publish button and let your site go live. This is a great time to let any friends, family, or social media followers know that your site is launched and ready to go. Invite them to come to check it out and leave feedback on what they like and don’t like about it.

It’s also a great idea to create a sitemap for your site. You should submit your site to search engines so that they’ll know that your site is live and so they’ll start sending visitors your way.

7. Maintain It

Remember that publishing your site is only the beginning. You’ll need to continually tweak it more as time goes by and use SEO tactics to make sure it gets plenty of traction from search engines.

When it comes to maintaining your site after launch, there are about a million things you can do. You’ll want to ensure that you improve the technical side of your site and that title tags, images, and other elements are optimized for speed and for compatibility with mobile devices.

It’s a great idea to sign up for Google Search Console so that you can monitor your site and see if there are any problems. You’ll also want to continue to add blog content to your site over time to ensure that search engines favor it in searches and continue to send visitors your way.

Using These Tips For Building a Website From Scratch

Building a website from scratch can be difficult if you’re not used to the process. However, by following the tips above you’ll be able to get your website launched in minutes and will be able to start creating your brand on the web.

Want to make sure your new site is modern and trendy? Click here to learn about the 8 hottest website design trends of 2019.