Whether you're selling products, providing services, running an agency or simply starting a blog, you're going to need to create your own website. Simply speaking, any business or service provider that doesn't have a website these days might as well be invisible – and invisibility won't get you any sales.
In contrast, when you create a website you can attract the attention of potential customers, communicate better with your existing customers, widen your customer base, and have a launchpad and a destination for your business marketing strategies.
So how do you create your own website? This guide will take you through the step-by-step process you need to follow and the issues you need to consider in order to create a brand-new website that meets the needs of your business.
Before creating a website you need to buy a domain name and purchase hosting. Don't let these terms scare you. A domain name is the name of your website, such as fiverr.com. When you have a domain, you need somewhere to store your website; this is the hosting, which is the physical storage of your website.
Another way to think about it is that your hosting is a piece of land that you rent and the domain is the house you put on it. The two together allow people to reach you online by typing in your domain name (also known as a web address or URL).
Many of the companies that provide web hosting also sell domain names. Two popular providers of both are GoDaddy and HostGator, but there are many others. The first thing you need to do is to check whether the domain name you want is actually available. Most providers have an easy way to do that and also suggest related alternatives if the one you actually want is not available. It can be difficult to find the right domain name, so consider getting some help. Fiverr has plenty of sellers who will help you to come up with a catchy domain name.
Once you have your domain name and hosting, you need to put some content on your website. The best way to do this is with a content management system. This will allow you to change the structure and design of your website, to manage navigation, to add pages, and to add content without needing any coding experience.
The most popular content management system by far is WordPress. Although many people think of WordPress simply as blogging software, it is far more than that. It is a robust content management platform that is suitable for any kind of website.
In fact, it powers 27.5% of the web, running everything from personal blogs to the New York Times. Other popular content management systems include Joomla!, Drupal, and ModX, but there are many more.
You can also consider solutions like Wix and Weebly, where once you have a domain name, you don't need hosting but can build your entire business website within the platform. And if you are planning to sell products, consider Shopify, an e-commerce platform which allows you to design your entire web shop from within its interface. Whichever option you choose, Fiverr sellers can help you to get started.
Okay, so let's assume that, like most people, you are going to go with WordPress for the creation of your website. In order to make it look right, you're going to have to get a theme. The theme is the design of your website, which affects what your customers see. How you manage the website doesn't change, no matter what theme you have.
There are literally thousands of WordPress themes to choose from. It's important to choose a theme that reflects your business, but making the choice can be a challenge. You can have themes designed for restaurants, themes intended for education, themes for corporate sites, themes for selling products and services online, themes for simple bloggers – the list is endless.
A good place to get started, especially if you're on a tight budget, is the WordPress themes directory. This has hundreds of free themes and you can use the built-in on-site filtering tools to select themes by layout, subject (such as food and drink or photography), and features (including the ability to use custom headers or integrate accessibility features).
However, one issue with free themes is that they are widely used and therefore your website may not stand out as much as you would like. Also, because the creators aren't paid, some free themes don't have the level of support that you might need. The alternative is to pay for a more professional theme, which will give you more layout and design options and better support in case there are any issues.
One of the great things about WordPress is that it can be extended almost infinitely with plugins. There are more than 48,000 plugins in the WordPress plugin directory. These allow you to add new features to your website without having to do any coding. Any developer can develop a new plugin for WordPress, so how do you choose from this huge list to find the plugins that work well and enhance your website? We've got you covered, with a list of the nine most important plugins you must install and configure.
This is the most important plugin you will install on a site. This plugin will help you with search engine optimization for your WordPress site so that it ranks better in the Google search results. You can do some overall configuration for your website at the start, but you can also use Yoast SEO to optimize every new page or post you create.
This plugin helps to speed up your site by creating a cache of your content so that pages can be loaded more quickly. Since pagespeed is one of the factors in search ranking, using a caching plugin is good for SEO, and W3TotalCache is one of the most popular.
Spam is the bane of our lives and it doesn't just affect email; it also affects blogs. If you create a blog as part of your website and allow comments, then chances are you will get spam comments posted by users or bots. Akismet helps to identify and eliminate those spam comments so you have a clean website.
The built-in WordPress contact form is a little bit basic. That's why thousands of people use Contact Form 7 both for their contact page and to collect visitors' emails.
If you want to keep the hackers away from your website, then a security plugin is a must. Wordfence Security secures your site, lets you block attempted logins and bad bots, and even reminds you to keep your plugins and themes up-to-date for additional security.
Share Buttons by AddThis is one of the most-used social sharing plugins. It will automatically add social sharing buttons to each blog post to make it easy for readers to like and share your posts on social media. Social media sharing is important for engagement, reach and SEO, so a plugin like this is essential.
WordPress has built-in comment management but sometimes you need a little bit more. Comments – wpDiscuz allows you to customize comment forms, integrates with social login, has antispam features and much more. In fact, it's the plugin we use on our own Fiverr blog.
There's nothing like a beautiful photo gallery to capture the attention of web visitors. FooGallery and Envira Gallery are popular photo gallery plugins that are pretty easy to use. Check out the previews and see which one you like best.
If you're planning to sell items on your website, then you need to be able to upload them easily, sort them into categories, add prices, and allow people to purchase them using PayPal or a credit card. That's exactly what you get with WooCommerce. All you need to do is install the plugin, configure the basic options, and start selling.
Congratulations! You have now created a great foundation for your web presence. Your easy-to-manage website is completely accessible and mobile-friendly, search engine optimized, and ready for your users to engage with you and for you to collect your customers' emails so that you can engage with them.
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