We have talked a lot in past articles about how small home-based businesses can prosper with the right mix of social media marketing and SEO on the website, how to be successful in your interactions with potential customers, and so on. All this time we have started all our tips and recommendations with the basic prerequisite that you have a website.
However, for many newcomers to the world of home-based entrepreneurship, the idea of building a website is just as unfamiliar as, for instance, the idea of building a house on your own. Luckily, it is both simpler and less expensive to make your own website!
Ideally, you could go to a web design agency, they charge you a price in the range of hundreds or thousands of dollars and they take care of everything. But you probably do not have so much money to spend on a website and, if you do, you’d rather invest it in raw materials, office equipment or marketing campaigns to attract more customers. This is why we’ve decided today to tell you what it takes to build your own website. Let’s get started!
1. Purchase Your Domain
The first step in the journey towards having your own website is securing an internet domain name. This will be the URL of your website and it must be a short, easy to remember and representative name for your business. Most home-based business owners include their own name in the domain name – which is a smart option because the URL is indexed by Google and you are thus easier to find.
2. Find an Adequate Hosting Service
Before you start thinking about any other technical aspects, you should tick-off the hosting issue. It is an important one because, depending on the software they use and the site building facilities they offer, you will then select the platform for your website. It is not recommended to start working on the website without knowing if the hosting company supports the respective platform or if you can upload your website without advanced coding knowledge.
When you select your hosting service, even if you pick the cheapest plan, keep scalability in mind. As your business grows, as your website becomes more complex and has more visitors, you need more bandwidth and storage space. You should pick a hosting service which offers easy upgrades to premium tier services without any hassle and data loss.
3. Select Your Website Platform
As we said before, some hosting services such as GoDaddy offer a free site builder platform in the hosting plan. This means that you can start working on your website right away, without having to go through this step. But be aware of the fact that if you decide, some time in the future, to move your website to another hosting service, it may be impossible to do so because the website is not transferable by upload.
Therefore, the best solution is to have an independent platform, such as WordPress. This is currently the most popular platform for websites. Why? For the following reasons:
⦁ It is open source, therefore free;
⦁ It is continually improved and developed by many independent programmers;
⦁ There are tons of useful plugins which you can integrate in your website, such as SEO and social media buttons;
⦁ The content management system has a very user-friendly interface, which anyone can use to maintain the website without any coding skills;
⦁ There are lots of professional-looking templates available at an affordable price, or even free.
4. Pick a Theme
The website theme represents the graphic structure of the website: menus, layout, color scheme and fonts. Most themes can be customized by replacing colors and fonts, but usually not in terms of menu structure and layout. When you select a theme, make sure that it is scalable so that you can add as many pages as you need in the future, integrate a blog feature or even an eCommerce section.
Once you have all these, you can start working on your website by creating the menu structure, uploading content and customizing the look of your website.
5. Test before Launch
It is understandable that, once you are done with the work on your website and you have uploaded it on the hosting server, you are excited to share the news with everyone, including potential customers. Before you do that, you should test your website in various browsers (Internet Explorer/Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera) and devices (desktop, laptop, smartphone and tablet).
Make sure that all pages and all content items are displayed properly on all of these browsers and devices. If they don’t, you probably need to contact your hosting tech support for advice. Otherwise, your website is ready to go live.