How To Build A Website

Long gone are the days that the IT nerds locked in their basement were the only people who could build brilliant websites. Website development is now a much more streamlined process, so much so that a lot of people are building websites for their blogs (too many people have too much to say on these in our opinion, but that’s a matter for another day!), hobbies, clubs, businesses etc. without huge constraints in either time or money. Some coding knowledge will obviously help, but it is by no means a necessity.

The main steps to get you up and running with a website are:

1. Purchase a domain

This is your website address i.e. ours is digital88.co.uk There are a few places you can purchase your domain, Go Daddy and 1&1 are both very reputable and very reasonably priced. You also might want to add on an email address and mailbox at this stage (e.g. info@digital88.co.uk) and some of the domain providers will provide you a mailbox for free.

2. Build the website on a content management system

This will be the biggest and most important part when it comes to building your website. You need to choose the right content management system (the platform on which you build your website) for your skills, your budget, and the type of website you are going to be running. Different content management systems might work best for a blog, others for a business for example.

Do your research here and don’t skimp on it. Probably the easiest CMS out there in terms of developing your website is Wix, but there’s also Squarespace for example. WordPress will give you more functionality and customisation ability, but you will need to invest a bit more time learning this if your coding isn’t up to scratch. There are then options such as Joomla, Magento and Demandware which are more powerful but will cost more and again require more coding skills. You can build ecommerce into any of these options, but there are specific ecommerce platforms such as Shopify as well.

Research is key on this step.

3. Connect your domain to the website

You will be able to do this by configuring some settings on both your domain provider account, and your content management system account.

4. Get the website hosted

Website hosting is basically the storing of your website on servers, which means when someone types in your website address, the website and the webpages can be viewed. You can purchase hosting normally through the content management system, or you can go to a specific domain hosting company. We would advise purchasing it through your content management system.

Once you have gone through this process, you will have a developed a website :)

Don’t forget that your website needs to look good on mobile and keep SEO in mind when you are building your website. We would also recommend setting Google Analytics up on it so you can monitor the traffic to your website.

This is a service we provide for a lot of clients, so if you want any help or have any more questions on it, please get in touch!