Have you ever heard your grandparents talking about the internet of their time?
No right?
90s was a period when one didn’t even knew about scrolling a page.
Some people didn’t even have a mouse and those who had didn’t have scroll wheels. Also, the internet was based on a dial-up connection.
Today, no task is complete without scroll, and most households have high-speed internet that is invisible in air.
Therefore, websites have become more complex and fancy as compared to earlier ones. But you can easily create your own website in a faster way than surfing the net as in 1995.
As per some studies, 70-80% of consumers research a business online they visit personally or make a purchase. It indicates that a website is as essential for companies today as having a phone number.
Suppose you’re starting a new business venture or developing your personal brand. Or, maybe you want to update your the outdated website of your company. May it be any reason you can’t resist yourself from creating a new website, particularly without technical expertise or a budget for web developers.
One of the best parts is that you don’t have to waste your time on DIYing a website from scratch. Also, you don’t need to sell your arm or leg to hire a professional designer or developer.
It means you can start without even investing a penny.
There are hundreds of websites being created with a website builder tool. Do you want to learn how to create a website without any coding skills? Let’s check it out!
Before checking the process of building a website, let’s take a look at the advantages of using a website builder tool.
Advantages of Website Builders
Ease of Use
There are many website builders such as Weebly, Wix, etc. that come with tutorials and user-friendly dashboards, making the website building process fast, handy and easy to understand.
Free Professional Templates
All the website builder tools come with a complete set of responsive or mobile-optimized templates. These include both free and developed by professional web designers. The templates may be categorized depending on their themes to make user search easier.
Free Hosting and Domain
Moreover, they also include an integrated domain name and web hosting options that help you to create, publish, and launch your website easily, and quickly. Also, many web design services offer bonus domains to users that make annual payments.
Design Customization
You are not only allowed to choose between a variety of templates and themes but also get a complete set of design customization tools to create stunning website appeal.
Plan for Your Website
At first, decide the reason behind having a website. What is your goal? Though it may be a simple question for you, there few things you should think upon prior to starting with your project.
Think about the type of audience you will be targeting. Is it the already established one such as your previous followers and customers, or a complete new segment of people to your project?
Once you decide on your target audience, it will be easy for you to find the type of content to be published on your website. You will also need to check the way your audience will interact with it and share it with their followers, friends and communities.
To get an idea about this, check some of the websites of your favorite companies and brands. Take a look at their page layout and overall structure. This will inspire you to create a fresh, unique and functional website.
You can also create the website on your own with the help of website builder tools. May you select any option; don’t miss to create a basic site map.
What is a site map?
A site map acts as an important visual planning tool that will help you to learn about your content layout appearance as a finished web page. You can create a site map in an easy way, even with a pencil and a piece of paper. This categorized list will help your project to start running without a single line of code needed to be written.
Decide on Your Website Goals
After you are done with your initial planning, you can start thinking about the fun part: the reason your website is made for.
Do you know anything about the online store for selling unique products on the internet?
Maybe you are an artist that wants to have a good looking website to include your portfolio for potential clients.
In any case, you will need to have a trustworthy eCommerce platform installed that will enable you to get payments from your customers and ship products.
Websites aren’t just for businesses. You might have a personal blog that you would like creating and updating with engaging content. If you are skilled in anything that you would like to share with all, a website is the best way to represent that.
It is possible to do almost anything you want to with your creativity and imagination.
Today’s web building platforms have social media integration, so your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other services, can all be found across your website. This enables your visitors to check all the different platforms that you are currently active on.
If you think your followers appreciate your work, then you can set up a donations section where fans can show their gratitude to your work by donating small amounts to your PayPal account or BitCoin wallet.
It is also possible to redirect visitors to a Patreon account. With Patreon, creators can secure regular funding on a monthly basis, enabling them to follow their artistic and creative ventures in a more free way.
Developing a Website by Yourself
So, you have decided to build the website on your own. That’s great! Think it as an opportunity to learn the way to design a web page as compared to right now, with thousands of different online resources for you to learn from.
You will find that majority of these resources are free, but some are exceptional and need to be paid for. So, ensure that you have the budget for working, if you want to spend money on your website development.
Then you will need to think about a platform for building your website. Currently, two most popular platforms are Joomla and WordPress, which are highly standard website platforms for building attractive and functional web pages.
Everyone have their own choice on which one is better of the two. However, WordPress is surely a popular one. The basic reason is that WordPress offers a much user-friendly interface that helps to easily update blogs and pictures while offering users thousands of various templates and themes to customize their websites.
May you select any platform, you would be happily surprised due to the volume of free video lessons available on the internet, specifically on the popular video platform YouTube. When you search for tutorials related to website building, you will get thousands of results for a quick start in most cases.
You may come across a situation when a tutorial is offered for free but the plugins and templates needed for it aren’t. Hence, you will need to invest for these things if you are planning to follow the guides using commercial plugins or templates.
If you want to learn about it but are on a tight budget, some online training resources such as Coursera, Udemy or Udacity might help you. You will find both free and paid courses on these platforms. So, select one that fits your requirements and budget.
Using a Website Builder
This is a combined solution of DIY and outsourcing. In this, you can create your own website using the website builder with drag-and-drop feature. Moreover, you can also host your website on their platform and maintain your website.
You can easily build a website through a site builder. Once you get the idea of what your website is going to be used for, and have a basic site map created, you just need to find a theme that suits your imaginary website.
Maximum templates found inside a website builder are customizable and can be modified. This can give your website a unique appearance that will help you to stand unique from the crowd.
While using a website builder, there is no need of special knowledge or skills. Also, company from which you buy it will help your in everything to launch your website.
Finding the Right Hosting Solution
After your website is ready to get launched, it is important to search for a hosting solution that will take your website online and make it accessible to all.
You will get to see many different hosting partners such as MilesWeb that provide domain registration, hosting services as well as management tools such as website builders, apps for ecommerce and so on.
Selecting such a service that makes your website building easy will offer a professional and reliable outcome.
When selecting a web host you need to think about some extra features such as:
- Do you require 24/7 support?
- Do you need a managed service to stay away from the management tasks?
- Does your web host help you with backups, or it is possible for you to take the backup and restore a website from a backup?
It is important to think about all these things when you sign up to a service, so that you stay prepared while dealing with them.
Naming and Tracking Your Site
Though you may think it’s done, you need to search a suitable name for it. Ensure you select something that is directly related to the website objective. For instance, if want to sell jewelry ensure that the name should contain jewelry in it.
In case you are planning to display your wedding photography to get hired for more weddings, then the name should contain wedding photography.
It doesn’t cost more to register and maintain domain names. So, when you find your domain name available that can be easily remembered, suits your brand or content and is short then you are ready to register it.
The next thing you will need to do is track your website statistics such as average time spent on your site, daily visitors and many other useful metrics. This can be done via Google Analytics. Businesses can easily track their website performance, check if the users are getting what they need and also, make essential adjustments.
Creating and Managing Website Content
The biggest challenge once a website is build is creating engaging and appealing content. If your website’s goal is to display your talents then you won’t face any difficulty in this. But if you aren’t well-known to the process, it can prove to be tricky for adding the content.
Thanks to the CMS (Content Management Systems) such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, that make this task very easy. Most of the time you just need to copy and paste text and pictures into an open form on your CMS for adding excellent and unique content to your website.
You will find plenty of other CMS platforms available, so ensure that you search and experiment with different ones until you find the best one. Ensure that it is compatible with the hosting service that you select.
Can You Be A Website Designer?
You might have seen that building your website is as simple as coloring a picture. The only difference is you need to plan your website, the functionality and layout of your pages within the site.
You can build a simple or fully-featured website as per your requirements.
You don’t need to have in-depth knowledge about programming and scripting languages for launching a great looking website, which is good news for those who aren’t tech-savvy. Because of a website builder all the technical hurdles get eliminated, allowing you to focus on creating great content and design, and achieving your goals.
Therefore, anybody can try and build a website of their own.
Did you ever try to build your own website? Were you successful?
Let us know in comments, how easy it was to build a website using MilesWeb’s free site builder.
