Things You Need to Consider When Creating a Website

We cannot imagine living in the modern world without the presence of the internet. When we wish to browse the internet, we need to have a specific website in mind to visit. However, quite often we open search engines, such as Google, to look for the right websites that suit our needs.

It doesn’t matter whether you want to start up a new business, share your poetry, or run a personal blog – if you decide to start your own activities on the internet, you realize that you need to create your own website for it. The world that we live in today relies greatly on the internet, and if you want more people to know about you and what you do, you need to be online.

If you want to make your own website without any help from someone else, then our thorough list of articles will help you. But before you start working on your site, what are the most important things that you need to consider, and what are the stages of creating your own website?

Here’s an easy to follow list of things that will help you know what you’re doing

1. Choose the CMS of your project

The first thing you need to do is to decide what the topic of your project is. It is important to decide what it’s going to be about before you get into the later stages of having a website. It can be a professional website for a company, a blog, an online store, a slideshow, or anything that you want to share with the world.

Once you have decided on the topic, you need to select a CMS – which is short for Content Management System. As of today, there is a large amount of CMS available, which all exist to suit the needs of different types of developers. There are the specific ones that are more centered towards a certain type of project, then there are simpler ones that can be used by all kinds of newcomers, and lastly, we have the more complex ones that require programming knowledge.

Selecting the right CMS for your website is based on the topic that you have picked, and how deep you want to be involved in the process of development. Websites can be created by editing preset templates, and at the same time, you can create every single bit of your site from the scratch. Some of the decent options in the CMS market are: WordPress, Drupal, Shopify, OpenCart, Joomla, and Bitrix24. There are other options as well, which may be more relevant to your needs.

2. Look at the websites of your competitors

Before you begin the process of creating your site, it is heavily recommended that you look at the websites of people who will be your competitors, or just simply engage in similar activities as you. Familiarize yourself with the way they manage their websites and pay attention to the structure they established. Explore as many as you can websites in other niches and take notes on what you liked from them, and what you didn’t. You might want to implement something from their site to yours, and once you note these things, try to find the right method for implementation. It is important to have your own identity, but it is also helpful to see what others are doing.

3. Think about your website’s structure

It is very important to have a perfect structure of your website to help visitors to find easily the information that they need to. Think about the structure when creating your project, where would you like to add such as the main menu, different kind of sections and forms, the buy buttons, links to other pages etc. If you already have a business that you are intending to take online, you will find it easier to plan the structure of your website and maybe you will have some good ideas of how to highlight the benefits of your business.

However, your business would continue to grow, and you might have to make further additions to your website once it is already done, so planning your project with foresight and leaving room for future implementations is very useful.

4. One of the most essential factors – the domain name

Your domain name is an extremely important part of your website, and you should think about the name you will go with. The name will become the identity of your website and will remain the address of your site forever. It’s not easy to find a good domain name if you do not have a company name already, whereas it is quite simple if you do. The domain name should be something bright, sonorous, easy to remember and easy to type. The best way to decide is to pay attention to how appealing the name sounds as you hear and write it down.

Having an easy domain name means that people will remember it on top of their head, instead of needing a search engine, and you will even be able to tell them the address on a phone call without any issues. If you have a domain name that is easy to write, hear and remember, then you will attract more visitors. The keyword does necessarily have to be in your domain name for it to pop up on search engines as a relevant result.

Once you have the name ready to go, you need to decide what domain zone you will go for. This is usually determined by what level you wish to work on. For example, if you wish to operate internationally, then your domain would have something like .com, .info, .org and so on, at the end. If you wish to operate on a national or local level, then your domain zone would be something like.ca, .us, .uk and so on. If you have the time and money for it, you can even register on multiple zones at the same time, which is also a way to make sure a competitor does not create a domain with the same name but a different zone.

If your domain name is already taken, then you can either slightly change the address, or go for a different zone that suits you.

5. Choose your hosting provider

Next up, you have to decide what website hosting provider will work best for you. There are several differences between every web hosting companies, for example, some hosting services provide you with a free domain name as part of a paid annual hosting plan. Some of them offer free trials, while others make you pay but have a refund policy.

Look for the hosting services that suit your needs, and then research their services and take a look at the reviews other people have left for them, and their pricing structure. Determine which hosting service you are comfortable with the most, and pay attention to how their service works, such as things like their dashboard, developer tools, support.

Pay close attention to how the hosting company works for their customers and study their technical characteristics in order to understand if it matches your website’s management system or not.

Once you have a few hosting providers in mind, you should compare all the important information about their services and pick the one that suits your website the most. Try to go for the best plan for your website and the content you want to add to it, even if it’s a bit pricier than your expectations, because you need to take your website seriously. A slow server will affect your site’s performance, such as the speed your page will load on. You can also go for a shared hosting service to cut the costs temporarily, in the stage of creating your site. But it is recommended that you switch to a faster version of virtual hosting, or to go for a dedicated Virtual Private/Dedicated Server, or Cloud Hosting (such as Cloud VPS), once your site is up and running.

Don’t forget to think about the SSL certificate in the beginning. This is a secure connection that ensures that the information that is transmitted from your browser to the server remains private; that is, protected from hackers or anyone who wants to steal the information.

6. Draw a prototype of all the pages and the layout of your website

It will be helpful to have a full plan for the pages and the layout of your website, and one of the best ways of doing that is to draw a prototype for it. While it can be a proper blueprint made from digital programs, even just drawing it on a piece of paper can be enough. Think about the header, the footer and the body of each pages. Draw the structure of the main page, invent the blocks you will need and what order you would place them in. Planning your prototype is a very important part of website development. It’s recommended that you make a proper plan for what you want your website to be like and decide the plan for each separate page. Think out the text that will be on each page, the way each page looks graphically, and where you’d place your images and videos.

Depending on what kind of a website you make, you should also consider adding forms because it’s a very important part of generating traffic and monetization of your website. Think about where to place an application form, an order form, a subscription to your newsletter, feedback and contact forms.

7. Preparing the materials

When you have the topic and the layout decided, it is time to prepare the material and content of your website. Text, videos, images, infographics, all of these things are a part of the material you need to place on your website. Ideally, you should have your own high-quality images that you will use to create a header, a slider, the blocks on the homepage and on all of the other pages of the website. If you don’t already have the content, it is recommended that you use photos of your suppliers or partners and their products, given that you have their permission. You can also pay some services to use their photos and videos for your websites, such as Shutterstock or Depositphotos.

Find out copywriters and editors to write and proofread your text. Even if the text you write is in your native language, it is possible to not know how to write what is on your mind with 100% correctness. Hiring an editor will help you out with that, and they will create comprehensive and appealing text for your website.

Graphic designers can be hired to create infographics or other images. But if you have the energy to do it yourself, then you can use tools like canva.com for your content, which offers both a free and a paid subscription option.

8. Think about SEO in the stage of creating your website

SEO is going to be one of the most integral parts of your website, and it is essential that you keep it in consideration when making your website. Select keywords that are relevant and popular for your business, which will help your site to show up in search engines more easily.

You can use free services, or paid ones like SemRush, which happens to be one of the best marketing analytics software available. Looking at your competitors and studying their keywords will be a great help, and you should select 1 to 2 keywords for each page of your website.

Now that everything is ready, you can finally begin the process of creating your project. If you do it by yourself for the first time, we recommend that you use WordPress with the theme of Themify. Since 2010, Themify themes and plugins have helped more than 100,000 customers throughout the world in making beautifully responsive WordPress websites. The tool helps you create the sites faster and easier than the alternative methods and is recommended for everyone who is making a website for the first time.