Your website is your online identity so it needs to be compelling, engaging, and authentic to grab more attention. A full-fledged, functional website can do wonders for you which is not possible otherwise. According to a study, more than 76% of consumers visit the company or business website before visiting their physical store (link here).
Why? The authenticity and credibility that a website adds to any business!
While consumers today are more inclined towards digital dependency, having a website has become essential. Whether you want to build a website from scratch, CMS platforms, or by hiring professional developers, the entire website development journey can be overwhelming.
Let’s explore how to create a website in different ways, so you become knowledgeable about choosing the right platform to build your website.
A complete guide on how to build a website
Identify your website’s goals and purpose
Goals identification is the first consideration when starting your website creation venture. What types of services or products you are offering? What type of audience you are targeting? What makes your competitors stand out? What goals are you planning to accomplish via a website? Crafting goals and setting clear expectations before developing your website is vital to save time and to keep your vision aligned in the right direction.
Ask yourself a few questions and determine what exactly your website should serve.
What type of website do I want?
For instance; an e-commerce website comprises product pages, payment forms, etc. while a personal blogging site is like an online journal comprised of regularly published blog content. Every type of website has its requirements and objectives which are important to analyze to minimize complexities. The type of website and its purpose should be aligned beforehand so it becomes easier for you to speak through it and utilize it to create brand awareness.
What are my competitors offering?
Research your competitors’ sites and analyze their functionalities, features, designs, and elements that make them stand out. Pinpoint their potential bottlenecks such as slow page loading, improper navigation, complex shopping experience, etc. Your brand’s unique proposition should be highlighted on your website along with the vision and work ethos to attract more visitors to accomplish your website goals. Add artisanal appeal to your unique offerings to make it a selling point.
What is my target audience looking for?
Your audience is everything your website should revolve around. Understand your target audience, what they are looking for, and why they will reach out to you to solve their issues. Know your audience, create your website around their needs, and encourage them to take the right actions.
Jotting down your website goals and requirements helps you choose the right platform with the functionality and features that will help you create your website and execute your goals effectively.
Pick a domain
A domain name is your online business identity so it has to be your company or brand name or closely resonate with your business and offerings. Kickstart building your online identity with a domain name that is short, creative, and easy to remember. When a user enters a domain name or your site’s URL, the web server identifies your IP address and directs the user to your website.
A domain name contains the website’s name followed by .com, .org, .net, country codes, etc, The extension (TLD) you choose has a direct impact on the user perceptions about your business so when choosing an extension, ensure that it resonates with your business, target audience, and country.
Use the website name generator to pick a suitable name for your website, search for its relevant domain name, and check its availability status. Every domain is registered under a domain name registrar (like GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc.) that manages the domain reservations. Several website builders offer free subdomains (for example https://yoursite.wixsite.com.) but if you want to build a professional website, go for a custom domain name (https://yourbusinessname.com) by upgrading to the paid subscription plan. Some website builders offer custom domain names with free subscriptions for the first year which makes it a cost-effective solution.
Choose a hosting plan
Web hosting is the storage for your website on the internet servers that you rent out from the web hosting service providers. Server computers are powerful devices that store and manage your data and files online and process the requests to view them.
Most hosting providers also offer a domain-buying facility as part of their hosting plans, while for others, you need to purchase a domain separately from a domain registrar. Multiple hosting types are available catering to small, medium, or large-sized businesses. While some website builders offer web hosting in their website building plans, you must have to buy hosting to set up a website with a CMS. Choosing the right hosting plan is crucial for your business growth, security enhancements, and optimized performance.
Types of web hosting
Once you choose the right web hosting plan, you add more flexibility to design your website and provide it with a solid foundation for a compelling online presence.
Type of hosting | Specifications |
---|---|
Shared Hosting | Allows multiple websites to share the same physical server. Highly affordable. Good for small businesses with a small level of traffic. Provides less control over server configuration. |
Dedicated Hosting | Allows your website to have an entire dedicated physical server. Offers better speed, and more storage, and comes at a high price. Preferred by businesses to handle large levels of traffic. Allows access to the server configurations and can be tailored based on software and hardware. |
Virtual Private Server Hosting | Allows a virtual small part of the large server to your website while technically, it still is a part of shared hosting. Affordable than dedicated hosting. Ideal for businesses receiving consistent traffic. Offers better performance and speed than shared hosting. |
Managed Hosting | Allows the web hosting provider to manage the operations, setup, and maintenance of your server. More affordable than dedicated hosting. Preferred by small and medium-sized businesses to handle the traffic spikes. Saves time in managing the website technicalities. |
Cloud Hosting | Allows multiple servers to act as a large server. Users only pay for the cloud resources they use. Ideal for businesses growing consistently and requiring more cloud space. Easy to access resources from any location. |
Choose a website-building solution
So now that you have chosen a domain and hosting, it’s time to get into the most important step i.e., the WEBSITE CREATION. Let’s talk about two of the most popular DIY website-building solutions i.e., a website builder and a CMS. Both these solutions come with top-notch features and flexibility, professionally built niche-specific templates, add-ons, plugins, etc. to help you create outstanding websites. However, they both differ at multiple levels and give users different website creation and management experiences.
Creating a website using a website builder (DIY, beginner-friendly)
A website builder like Kemo SaaS is the best go-to website-building platform for users who don’t know how to code and don’t want to spend their time understanding the technical nitty-gritty of website development. It offers complete ease in creating a full-fledged website without hiring technical expertise. Multiple pre-made website templates are available which you can choose according to your business niche and customize it thoroughly using an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. You can also add add-ons and extensions to add advanced features and functionality to your website.
With a website builder, you can get a domain name, hosting, and SSL certificates at one platform depending upon which builder you are choosing and its subscription plans. However, not every website builder offers domain and hosting as part of its website builder subscription plan, but sometimes they offer them separately, so you have to check their subscription plans. By choosing the right website builder, you can quickly create a website without the need to install security features, fix errors, and manage the back-end maintenance work.
Creating a website using a CMS (DIY with some technical knowledge)
Do you know that over 43% of websites are powered by WordPress? It is surely the most popular CMS platform used by small and large businesses to create their website, thanks to the top-notch flexibility, state-of-the-art features, and limitless customization that it offers.
You can choose a template from a huge repository of in-house template collection or can upload a third-party template and add your content including text, and media files on your WordPress platform. While a website builder requires absolutely no coding, building a WordPress website requires a little technical knowledge to make your site highly customizable. Install plugins and add-ons to extend the capabilities of your website.
With a CMS platform like WordPress, you have to purchase domain, hosting, and SSL certificates separately. Open-source WordPress lets you create bespoke website design by allowing you to add HTML/CSS code for unlimited customizations. If you want to build a fully customized website, WordPress is the right platform that offers advanced functionalities that align with most business goals.
Pick a theme or template
When you have streamlined your website goals and have chosen the domain, hosting, and website-building platform, it’s time to transform your virtual web ideas into reality. And what could be a better way to start it by picking a theme or a template from a pre-built library of professionally designed themes and templates?
Both website builders and WordPress offer niche-specific themes and templates that you can pick based on the type of website, your brand identity, and the structure that you want your website to follow. It’s a good idea to look at your competitors’ sites to craft a visual image of your website.
Here are a few tips to help you pick a theme or template that will attract your targeted audience to your website.
- Minimal is the new go-to so when picking a theme or template, choose the one that has a minimal design, a clean structure, and does not have congested elements.
- Do not compromise on the website’s mobile responsiveness so make sure that the theme or template caters to mobile users as well and the design looks great across all devices.
- The background and text colors should have a right contrast to increase content readability and to reduce any strain on the reader’s eyes.
- Give your website enough breathing by leaving room for white spaces. Don’t stuff your website with unnecessary elements.
- Preview your themes and templates on different devices to see how they will look after they go live.
WordPress allows you to tweak the theme design as you want, giving you extra flexibility to build the website the way you want it. You can implement sitewide changes by editing your theme’s settings and taking complete control of theme customization. Website builder, on the other hand, comes with built-in customization settings to customize your template as desired, but not as much as WordPress.
Choose a color scheme and fonts
The color palette you choose for your website closely relates to your business identity. So, if you have a physical business, then use the colors of your business branding on your website. However, if you don’t have a branding before and have to choose the color scheme from scratch, it’s important to consider how color psychology can be implemented to trigger emotions in your targeted audience. Consider your business’s nature and the vibe that you want your audience to resonate with your web presence, and choose the color palette based on it.
You can see the colors of leading businesses in your industry, try different color options, mix and match different colors to develop a catchy color scheme or add a touch of whites and blacks to allow some breathing to the web pages. From the base color, text color, accent color, and complementary hues, every color can evoke excitement or emotions in your website visitors which leads to better engagement and conversions.
While colors play a vital role in driving engagements, choosing the right font helps in increasing readability. When picking up a font, make sure to keep it simple and not too loud. It should be mobile responsive and easy to read across all devices. The colors and typography should remain consistent throughout the website and match your branding.
Upload logo, images, and visuals
No website exists without a logo. A logo instantly grabs attention and resonates closely with your brand. Create a unique logo matching your colors and fonts and place it in the header and across the website where needed. The logo you choose should look the same across all devices, business cards, packaging, and marketing platforms. You can test different logo sizes to see which appears the best.
Since images and infographics give your website a visual boost, you should be choosing high-quality and royalty-free images for your website that help your audience understand your products, services, blog, and text content in a glimpse, and are associated with your business identity. You may purchase images, use free photos from Google, design or capture images, and use them on your website. Always use clear images and don’t get embarrassed by using blurred ones that immediately take the visitors away. The images you use should be of the right size depending on where they’re used on the website and compressed so they don’t affect the page’s loading time.
Build your site structure
Transform your virtual ideas into a well-organized website structure that is not only convenient for the users but is also loved by search engines. Your website should encompass how your online presence would look like, where the crucial information will be placed, how the user journey will be catered to, linear or nonlinear navigation, the hierarchy of web pages, and the link among them, etc.
A logical and well-structured website ensures proper page crawling, allows optimum distribution of content across the web pages, reduces the chances of cannibalization, offers visitors a smooth website experience, and helps search engines understand your content. Whether you are using a website builder or a CMS to create a physical or service business website, blog, portfolio, or any other website, the core pages will be as these:
- Home Page: Since this is the first page the user interacts with when he enters your site’s URL, also, the root for search engines to crawl your whole website, you should design and optimize it in the best way possible. Highlight your services, and your top offerings, and give your audience the reason to trust you. Put important elements on the Home Page, and keep it professional yet beautiful, so the visitors instantly understand everything about your business the moment they land on the page.
- About Us Page: Share your brand story to your audience that connects to them instantly. Use this page to describe your business journey, how you started it, and your goals, share your team’s photos and their roles and display certificates, testimonials, etc. to develop trust with the audience. Think of About Us Page as your online business card so keep it authentic and honest.
- Products/Services Page: The real deal lies here – displaying stuff that you are offering i.e., products or services. List your offerings in this section by creating product/service categories and pages, displaying product/service images, pricing, subscription plans, etc. Pen down the specifications and benefits of your services or products so your audience can understand how your business can resolve their pain points.
- Blog: Establish yourself as an industry expert by sharing your insights on market trends regarding your services and products in the blog section of your website. A regularly updated blog not only establishes the credibility of your website but also increases your website’s value for the search engine. Build a relationship with your targeted audience by sharing guides, tips tutorials, case studies, news and updates, or knowledge about your services and products.
- Contact Us Page: A dedicated contact page where you can put your contact details including phone number, email address, physical address with map, social media links, and business hours, and add a contact form so your audience can reach out to you with their queries. A comprehensive contact page will make it easier for the site visitors to contact you regarding their concerns and allow you to nurture them.
Some other web pages that you can add based on your business are:
- Booking page: Create a dedicated booking page for your visitors to schedule an appointment for your services using a booking form or calendar.
- Affiliate disclosure: If you are running an affiliate website, the affiliate disclosure will inform the visitors about the product compensation that you will receive when a product sells via affiliate links, display your business policies, etc.
- Career Page: If you are running a corporation or business and hire employees on and off, add a career page to your website to highlight the job details, the required skills, etc.
- Buyer’s guide: A web page dedicated to the buyer’s guide provides comprehensive information about the products or services, highlights the buyer’s checklist, and offers industry insights to help buyers make informed decisions.
Once your web pages are created, the next thing is to get them crawled by the search engine for indexing and organize them for smooth navigation for users.
Create sitemap
A sitemap works like a roadmap that allows search engines to search your website. All webpages of your site are listed in the sitemap and should be constantly updated whenever you add or move a webpage. It gives a complete overview of the web pages and content and helps crawlers to index your web pages.
Place engaging CTAs
Call to action is the most important element on a webpage that encourages visitors to take specific action on your website. It could be buying a product, subscribing newsletter, scheduling an appointment, donating, signing up for an event or a subscription plan, downloading a file, software, app, etc. Place a compelling CTA on your Home Page, in the menu, and relevant web pages as well to enable visitors to take action.
Optimize the site’s navigation
Place the navigation bar horizontally or vertically allowing visitors to navigate through your web pages the right way. You should place the links to the important web pages in your navigation bar so the visitor can always access them easily. Include a large menu where all the web pages are categorized and you can view them upon hovering. Create an anchor menu at the top with all the pages if you are running a small website. The navigation bar should be optimized for mobile users as well to make web pages easily accessible through mobile devices.
Add value to the footer section
Add copyright notice, logo, newsletter signup, social media links, and important business pages such as privacy policy, return policy, refund policy, terms and conditions, disclaimer, order tracking, etc on the footer to grab visitor’s attention and easy navigation. Create a footer strategically, drag and drop elements on the footer in case of a builder, or customize it using WordPress customizer, and lastly ensure it displays well and works on all devices.
Populate the website with valuable content
Content is the lifeblood of your website and to provide value to your visitors. As the visitors scroll through your website, there should be valuable content to educate them about your business, provide value, and facilitate their interactions. You need to decide on the content options you want to display on your website and once you have decided, the next important thing is to create the content and set the content hierarchy.
Put eye-catching content at the top of the page where it will instantly catch the attention and encourage visitors to stay on the page. Use infographics for added appeal, and use descriptive yet informative content pieces that align with your business.
When crafting content, keep your targeted audience in mind and give them a reason to trust you by highlighting your business’s unique proposition. Set a tone that matches both the brand and the audience. Try out different methods to play with the words and analyze how your audience interacts with them.
Optimize for SEO
SEO is your effort to help crawlers reach your web pages and rank them so they will appear at the top of the SERPs. Optimizing your site for Google crawlers is vital if you want your website to get maximum reach. Whether you are building your website using a CMS or builder, your website must be optimized for SEO to drive organic traffic.
There are keyword research tools to help you find keywords relevant to your business and see what your target audience is searching on search engines. You can implement SEO best practices for your site’s optimization. From optimizing your on-site elements such as content, images, titles, etc. to getting high-authority links to your website, a good SEO practice works to make your site appear trustworthy and rank higher for your target audience.
Talking about technical SEO, some website builders take care of it but if you are building a website with CMS, you have to take the job on your shoulders or hire seo personnel to serve the purpose efficiently.
Test and launch
Once you’ve selected and customized the theme or template and all the web pages, images, and content are aligned, you are ready to launch your website. We know this is the most exciting part but hold on and do a thorough testing of your site to analyze if there is any potential issue. To ensure a smooth launch and optimal user experience, here are some key tests to conduct for your website.
- Links: Check all internal and external links are working.
- Forms: Ensure all forms work correctly, including validation and submission.
- Payment gateways: If applicable, verify that payment processing is secure and functions properly.
- Error handling: Test how the website handles errors and unexpected situations.
- Website search: Test the website’s search bar and results.
- Navigation: Make sure visitors can easily navigate through the website.
- Usability: Consider how people will use and interact with your website.
- Mobile responsiveness: Test the website’s design, functionality, and speed on different devices.
- Load time: Test website loading speed for each page across different devices and optimize for performance.
- Browser compatibility: Check how the website loads, appears and functions across different browsers.
- Security: Verify that the website is highly secure and is protected from vulnerabilities.
- Spelling and grammar checks: Check formatting, and proofread all content for accuracy.
- Consistency: Everything on your website should be consistent in terms of branding, writing style and tone, visuals, design, etc.
- Load: If you expect high traffic in the future, simulate heavy traffic to your website to identify performance bottlenecks.
Test the website in its preview mode and when everything looks and works great, hit the ‘publish’ button.
Voila! Your first website is live for the world to see.
You can still make edits, add design tweaks, and make your site look as perfect as you want.
Website Promotion
You have just launched your website but that’s not enough. You want maximum people to know about it. Promote your website via social media, do email marketing, publish guest blogs, and run promotional campaigns to ensure that your site reaches out to maximum visitors. Send newsletters, and promotional offers, and drive more traffic to your site. Experiment with Google and Facebook Ads and post regularly on your website’s social media handles. Take the assistance of digital marketing experts to do the marketing chores and handle the digital workload.
Post-launch website maintenance
If you have just accomplished the milestone of building a website using a CMS or with a website builder, you need to keep your website updated and keep checking its performance metrics. Your website demands regular maintenance to ensure that it is performing the best. Don’t let your website be outdated and keep a close look at its design, keywords, content, loading speed, responsiveness, errors, security, etc, and ensure that every element of your site is updated and performing optimally. Keep monitoring your website traffic, bounce rates, and visitors’ behaviors, and use these insights to better optimize your website.
While your website content is up-to-date, you also need to keep your data secure by installing security software or security plugins to your WordPress website to prevent malware or security breaches. Create your site backup as well to prevent the worst possible scenario of getting your site lost due to any reason. Some website builder allows you to keep your site history so in case, your website goes missing, you can create a duplicate site without losing any data.
Bottom line
Whatever platform you are choosing to build your website, you should provide a strong groundwork for your website that starts with effective planning. While website builders are great for beginners and give you the ease of creating a website, it might not work if you are planning to build a structurally complicated and slightly advanced website. A CMS platform comes as a savior for building complex websites with the desired functionalities and features through in-built and third-party features.
Once you have developed a website, you can leverage its benefits and effectiveness by keeping it up-to-date and maintained. Do regular audits of your website, keep testing it, and don’t be afraid to make changes to keep your site’s health, performance, and design optimum. Promote your website through the right channels, keep growing, and see the desired outcome of your online presence.
FAQs
What is the best way to build a website?
Website builder and CMS platform are two of the most popular methods to build a website. If you want to create a website but don’t have much technical knowledge, you may use a website builder that comes with pre-made templates and a drag-and-drop editor but the customization is limited with the web builder.
If you want to build a highly customizable website with a lot of advanced features and functionality, a CMS like WordPress can help you create one. You need to have a bit of technical knowledge that you can learn online easily in some time to use WordPress to build the desired website.
Can I create a website for free?
Yes. Multiple website builders offer free plans to build your website but there are limitations as well such as limited time, low storage, ad display, limited customization, etc.
How can I update my website regularly?
Keep your website updated by, adding new blog posts and content, fixing errors if any, adding customer reviews, and fresh images, improving site speed, and keeping your plugins updated.