Web Development: How to Build Your Own Website
Build your own website – Are you looking to grow your business or looking for some business to do online? Then building your own website could be a great option. It looks very tough as a beginner to how to start a website, but once you get started it will be fun and you will really see the growth of your business on real time data. Nowadays every customer searches for you on google first then they reach you. That’s why having your own a website is important in this era.
If you are a beginner and don’t know anything about websites then don’t worry you have landed on the right page. This course will cover everything from basic to advanced level that you need to know about building a website and types of websites. You don’t need to be a prodigal to build your website and don’t even need an expert to create a website. There are several ways on the internet through which you can know how to make a website and we will go through them in detail.
Through your own website it’s easier to achieve your goal. Some of you may think that here we will see some website coding lectures, but you are completely wrong. With this developed technology and web design tools anyone can start designing a website from scratch. At the end of this article you will know everything about how to design a website and all the terms associated with it. Let’s get started without wasting further time.
This guide is divided into 3 major sections where first you have to choose a platform on which you have to build a site according to your niche. If you haven’t decided till now which business you would like to do, then you can visit How to do Online Business: Build Your Presence Online and choose your niche.
1. Choose the platform – free or paid
2. Pros and cons of free platform
9. Navigation
Choose the platform – free or paid
Choosing a platform is the first step towards your business. There are several platforms on the internet where you can developing a website. These platforms can be categorized broadly into 2 categories: one is paid and the other one is free. Choosing the right platform is important as it is a long-term game and everything in this world is interconnected.
Pros and cons of free platform
Pros | Cons |
no hidden charges | limited themes option |
good for beginners | no domain name |
same options as of paid | limited storage |
advertising | speed is slow |
How to create a website free of cost? Platforms for free website building are blogger, wordpress, wix, squarespace, drupal, joomla and many more. These are the famous platforms. Best website design in my opinion is WordPress and blogger for writing blogs, but if you wish to sell something online (ecommerce websites) then wix is preferable. These all platforms have a great and easy user interface, which makes it very easy to use. When you login to their portals you will get everything on your fingertips and you will be able to design ideas into reality of your website successfully.
In the case of a paid platform, first you have to register your domain name and hosting. We will see what they are and how to do it. Then either you can code your website if you know or you can use wordpress which is recommended because of easy wordpress maintenance. If you are thinking why to choose a paid version when you can avail it for free. Here is the answer, the free version has certain restrictions and is limited. As you will grow and traffic will increase to your site you need better optimization which is not available in free and the most important there are chances of hacking in free version as usually, they are not secured and you are working on someone else’s space.
Domain and hosting
Domain and hosting play the major role in website development. It all starts with them either choosing a free or paid version. In the free version you use someone else’s domain name and hosting and in the paid version you have your choice of domain name and hosting. So, let’s understand the domain names and hosting.
Domain name
In simple words, Domain name is the address or name of your website which you desire to be called out. Domain name is the key to access your hosting or server where all your data is stored on the website. In the case of the free domain, you can get a domain name of your choice of name but it will work as a subdomain and it will be attached to their name. but in the case of a paid domain name your name will be yours, which Is your brand identity. Domain is a very vast topic, to understand the domain completely, what are they, how it works and from where you can buy, you can read “Domain Name: Complete Guide for Beginner to Advance Level User” to find the answers of these questions.
Hosting
Hosting is everything about website performance. It’s very rare to find the best and cheapest hosting. There are free options also available, but as we have discussed it above, they come with certain restrictions. In simple terms hosting is nothing but a storage device or server of your website; where every data and your work is stored and anyone accesses it through the internet by searching your domain name on google. But no one can make changes to it except you. If you make the wrong decision while choosing hosting, it’s direct result will reflect on your website malfunctioning. Well you don’t have to worry about it as we have already covered the complete hosting guide in a different section, as it’s not possible to cover it here, you can read our Bluehost Reviews: Complete Guidance and Detailed Of Web Hosting.
This article covers everything from the beginning so it will be easy for you to understand if you are a newbie or you can directly buy the best website hosting that is bluehost by clicking here.
Customization
Till now we have set up everything to make our website launch and it’s not over yet. This is the time to convert your imagination into reality. I hope now you are clear with the idea on which you have to work, if still you haven’t decided then read our article How to do Online Business: Build Your Presence Online to decide your niche.
To start we need a website building software and here we will use wordpress which is a very common and best web design software. There are also other tools on the internet but almost every tool is with the same features but with a different user interface. To use wordpress hosting you have to install wordpress, which can be done through one click in your hosting account. If you are using bluehost then follow the below steps to install wordpress or if you are using any other hosting then steps will be similar:
Part 1 How to install wordpress
1. Visit bluehost official site
2. Choose your hosting plan
3. Search for your domain
4. Go through payment process and setup your account
5. Login to your account you will find one click installation
Part 2 How to use wordpress
WordPress is a website design software or content management system (CMS). WordPress has two ends: one is front end and other is back end
Front end
This is the display page of all your work or let’s say the imagination page which you have thought of, when you first think of how to build your own website designer. This page will be visible to all the users on the internet. All this activity on the front end is managed by the backend so let’s see what the backend is and how it looks.
Backend
In our case the backend is our wordpress dashboard as we are customizing through wordpress. To login to your dashboard simply in the URL bar enter “yourwebsite.com/wp-admin”. You will be redirected to the login page and enter the details which you have setup while installing the wordpress.
WordPress dashboard
On the left of your screen you will see a column from there you can toggle and start customising the column will consist of many options which are:
- Dashboard
- Home
- Updates
- Posts
- Media
- Pages
- Comments
- Appearance
- Plugins
- Settings and many more…
This is not the complete list, there is a lot more than this.
Part 3 Choosing right theme
Initially you will have the basic theme activated in your account by default. You can see a theme option in the appearance menu. WordPress already has tons of themes in it. You can add new ones according to your niche. Don’t worry if the colour combination doesn’t meet your expectations, you can change it later, just for now select a theme which looks similar to your imagination. Now install it and activate it.
Part 4 adding content
Now whatever users will see on frontend other than looks will be content on your site. So, before customising outlooks of your website first add some content so that it will be easy for you to customize. Content could be anything, you have to select content as per your niche. Start writing a personal blog, you can do that by going to the posts menu section. Apart from writing blogs, create at least 3 new pages by going through the page menu section on the left column. The 3 pages can be home, about us and contact form. Just remember don’t copy paste content from other websites as here it is treated as an offense and you may be punished by getting banned from ads companies and even your site can be downgraded. If your content is unique you will be rewarded by google by ranking higher on search engines.
Create your own content read here:
Create Your Own Blog; Without Investing and Earn
Part 5 Navigation
A well-organized website is a must. Your website navigation should be clear and easy to browse through, a complex structure may confuse users and again it will downgrade your site. Navigation can be managed by the menu bar in your website. Every theme comes with several menu bars which you can see under the appearance section. There you can manage your site’s complete navigation.
Part 6 Best wordpress plugins
Plugins are the applications. In wordpress there are hundreds of plugins. Plugins are used to maintain our site and also to perform some action. As wordpress allows you to do everything, but everything is not necessary for everyone. So wordpress has divided every action and features into plugins. You can install the one which you need so that your site will work smoothly. There are certain plugins which are mandatory to install.
Last part – Design your website.
Again, under the appearance section you will find an option of customization, this section is very vast and beyond our thinking. It will take time to learn it completely. Just for a glance this option allows you to work on the website layout ideas and design of your website. It has several options like colour, background image, font, typography, header, footer, menus, widgets, website design logo and many more.
Conclusion
This article covers every possible aspect for how to build a website from scratch. Building website may be easy but website maintenance is tough, you have to update your website regularly. As it is not possible to mention everything here so we have made different sections for hosting and domain name, there you can understand them completely. In the customization part we have discussed wordpress, but wordpress is not limited to what we have discussed.
It’s a humongous empire to build your own website, the only way to learn it is using it. This article only covers the building of a website, once you will build your own website you also need to promote it. You can learn how to promote it by reading our article on Digital Marketing for Success of Business. If you are already in any offline business and also want to go online for the same, but you don’t have time to build your website then you can hire professionals. Vertical solutions provides this service at very minimal rates, you can contact them by visiting: https://vsi.co.in/