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Nowadays, there are so many different sites that you can use to create your own websites with drag and drop tools and free website hosting.
Most startups and beginners want to use free website creation tools to lower their costs, and that is understandable. However, most of these sites and tools are faulty, have weak security, limited design options, and sometimes you can’t even run advertisements and make money.
In the long run, you would want a stable, secure, well-designed, and properly developed website that can also look good on mobile devices or even convert your website to mobile app.
Steps in Creating Your Website
Firstly, you have to identify what kind of website you would need:
- Business/Informational Website
- E-commerce Website
- Personal Website/Portfolio
- Event Website
Think about what you want to achieve as a brand and how you want to showcase yourself or your products/services. Do you want to sell products on your website? Do you want to showcase yourself and your achievements? Do you want to establish your online presence?
Your goal should determine the direction of your website design and development. Your overall branding is also a big factor that you should consider in creating your site.
Secondly, once you’ve identified your goal, you have to establish your domain name and make sure it’s unique. When getting a free domain or buying one, you have to make sure that you’re the only one with that name for legal purposes.
Just like when you apply for a business registration, you need to be unique. You might find this step challenging, especially web hosting, but once you finalize your name, you’ll have to stick to it so people can also remember you in the long run.
Thirdly and the most time-consuming is website design. Even if there are available themes and design tools, sticking to your branding and creating different design elements can be a challenge. You could hire digital marketing experts to do this for you so you can save a lot of time and energy.
You just have to tell them which colors you like to see, your tone and style, and these experts can create amazing things for your website.
The design elements and colors that you chose should also be consistent with what you will use for your social media marketing, mobile app creation, and other visual assets.
Also take time to streamline your content so your brand voice is similar through all of your pages and posts. Identify how many pages you need for your website and the content for each page.
The most common pages in a site, for example an e-commerce website are:
- Homepage (Featured Products)
- About Us
- Shop
- Categories & Products
- Login & Registration
- Shopping Cart & Checkout
- Search & Search Results
- FAQ
In building your pages, you can always add or remove parts as you go along, it depends on which pages are important and have clicks and conversion.
Lastly, as conversion is already mentioned, you have to set up your analytics to measure the performance of your website. Tools like Google Analytics provide rich insight into how many people are visiting your website, how long they stayed on your pages, how they found out about you, and many other details that you can analyze.
With the results of your data, let’s say you launched your site for three months already, you have to check the analytics for the past three months and study the demographics of your site visitors.
Create reports of where they are coming from, countries, cities, which devices they are using, their age group, and all the other data that you need so that you can further improve the design, the content, and the marketing aspect of your website.
You can also consider competitor analysis so you can check how people see you compared to other similar brands or personalities.
With this data, you can then take steps to develop your strategies and aim for higher traffic and conversion in the following months.
The final steps in website development
To tell you honestly, there is no final step for website development as it is a constant effort. Your SEO also should always be updated as there is a new trend every single day.
To be able to grow as a brand, you should have adequate website maintenance and continuous SEO, content, and design efforts to keep your website relevant.
The world is always innovating, and so should we. There is always room for improvement and you just have to be patient but at the same time persistent in getting your brand out there.
