How to make a website

This guide will help you step by step in how to make a website from scratch. The guide is for those who are planning to make a website in any industry: Art or entertainment, computers, technology, health, for the kids, recreation/travelling, Sports, finance, real estate or other niche.

Each of the steps is described below with the helpful links, wherever required.

Step 1 – Think and have a domain name

The first step towards answering the question how to make a website is to have a domain name. The domain name or URL that relates to your business or intended purpose of the website, that is easy to remember and that you will tell the people face to face – your domain name should be well thought out. After deciding the name of your domain, you should first check its availability.

You should also think whether it should be a TLD (Top Level Domain) like .com, .net, .org etc or ccTLD (country code Top Level Domain) like .co.uk, .us etc. If your website is targeting a local business then you may think of the ccTLD while if you intend to be found and target worldwide you may think of a TLD.

Free Domain

Note that, many hosting companies offer one year or even lifetime free domain with hosting package these days. Read the section below to find a few hosting companies with the free domain offer.

To register a domain you may use this: 

Step 2 – web hosting

The second major step to make a website, after registering a domain name is to have a web hosting for your website. Basically, your website is the combination of web pages like the home page with the introduction, company logo, products or services pages, contact page and images etc. These web pages and images must be “hosted” somewhere (web server) in order to make it available when a user visits your website.

For example, you have registered a domain www.yourcompany.com. What if a visitor types this in the address bar of a browser. Ask yourself, how and what will be shown to him/her?

This is where you will need a hosting company. They will host all your web pages, files, images or videos etc. and as a user types your domain or comes from a search engine, the hosting company’s web server will serve those visitors with the information you associated with your domain.

Choosing a web host is really critical. A lot of companies provide hosting services across the world. So the quality of the web hosts differ incredibly and so deciding which web hosting company to go with becomes also crucial.

It also depends on your budget, how crucial is your website availability is and expected number of visitors to your website. All these factors are really important or else you will be in trouble soon or later.

Following are a few suggested web hosts based on the quality and price factors. These companies also offer a free domain with hosting packages.

Suggested web hosting companies

Sign up for a hosting account: 

Step 3: Plan and make a website

After choosing a domain name and hosting company, this is time to make your website or design and develop a website. As mentioned earlier, a website is the combination of web pages, a logo of your company or brand, images or videos etc. Planning your website presentation is really important. You should think how the landing page should look. How should be the navigation or menu for inner pages like product or services, contact, about etc.

If you have a little expertise in HTML and CSS or interested to learn, you may develop the website with static pages yourself. Otherwise, you can hire some expert at the nominal rates to design and develop a website for you.

Or you can outsource this to the established online middleman services like freelancer, elance or oDesk. You can outsource as per the budget and reward the project based on the bidding and by reading the reviews about the bidders.

You can use the free online website builder software (e.g wix etc.) as well for that or if you can afford, you can go for the nominal charges for better services and pre-build template options.

You can also create a WordPress based blog website, that requires a little learning. The above suggested hosting company offers the one step WordPress implementation. After installing the WordPress blog, you may find a theme according to your plan for the website, free or paid. Read more about how to install the WordPress and WordPress themes.

You can use other blog services as well like blogger.

Step 4: Publishing your website and going live

After making a website, it is time to upload the files to your hosting account. If you have developed a website in the HTML or simple dynamic pages, you can upload the files by using the FTP software e.g. WinSCP, cuteFTP or other. Check your hosting account or introductory email for the FTP account ID/Password. As you connect to your hosting account, generally “www” or “htdocs” folder is the place where files are uploaded. If not, this might have been specified in the email sent by the hosting company, after the registration process.

If you have created a blog by one click process provided by the hosting company then you don’t need to use the FTP at this stage. Just log into the WordPress admin panel and start writing / publishing the content.

Step 5: Marketing and SEO of your website

After you have purchased a domain, chosen a hosting plan and made a website, it is the time to plan how to market your website. Without proper marketing, it is just like having a great departmental store in some deep area where nobody comes.

Search engines are the main source of the traffic especially Google. As you are writing the content for your website, certain rules and regulations should be followed so that your site not only appears in the search engines but able to rank well. The rules and techniques to rank better comes under search engine optimization (SEO).  Here is a brief about different marketing technique to drive traffic to your website.

SEO

A few basic techniques include:

• Proper keyword research with respect to your website’s niche.
• Titles of web pages should contain primary keywords and that are meaningful to your visitors as well. These titles appear on search engines that drive traffic to your website.
• Meta tags should be properly taken care off.
• The content or body of the web pages should be not only good for the readers but also follows the basic rules of SEO.
• The more you rank high in the search engines, more traffic your website will get.
• The more traffic is relevant the more it accomplishes the purpose of the website: sales, leads, awareness etc.

Social Marketing

These days social marketing has become an important and serious source of driving the traffic to your website. Facebook and Twitter are the important sources. However, it really depends on the niche as well.

You should build a company or community page in the facebook, share the content from your website or related content from other sources. Increase number of likes/shares.

Paid advertising

You can also use the paid advertising like google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter, facebook advertisement etc. to bring targeted traffic to your website.

Conclusion

In order to make a website, first of all, you need a domain name that should match the idea of your website. After that, you need a web hosting plan that will host your domain name, web pages, images etc. After making the website, you need the visitors for what you should develop a comprehensive plan in order to achieve the purpose of making your website.