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3 Simple Steps to Build Your Own Website
Most of us think that building a website is not “my cup of tea”. Only coders can make websites. But no. Building a website in 2022 is not as difficult as you might think. With the help of new tools and techniques, you can easily make websites.
A few years ago, website building was pretty much difficult for normal people. But today, even a person without coding or technical knowledge can make a website.
In this article, we’ll discuss about making a website with a few simple steps. So I would request you to read this article till the end and later comment your thoughts in the comment section.
You will have to spend some money on your domain name and hosting to make your website accessible to your customers. But don’t worry, I will give you the best affordable hosting suggestions in the article.
Step 1: Register a Domain Name
Before hosting any website, you’ll need a domain name. The domain name is nothing but just a name of your website (like we have google.com, apple. in, etc). It’s just the address of your website. You will have full control over the entire website. The domain will cost you as low as Rs.29/month.
Before choosing a domain name, here are some things you should keep in mind:
- Your domain name should match your niche. For example, if you have a tech blog, it should have keywords related to tech.
- If you’re creating a personal website, you can use your name.
- Remember that you cannot modify the domain name of your website once it is registered.
Which domain extensions should I choose (.com, .in, .net, .org)?
Once you decide on your domain name the next thing you’ll encounter is what domain extension should I choose. There is n number of different domain name extensions available. (.com, .net, .in, .us, .org)
Read Here: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains)
The most used and common domain name extensions are .com, .in, .net, etc. These domain extensions are for websites that want to reach users globally. If you want the same you can go for the .com or .net domain name extension. Or if you are an organization then go for the .org extension.
However, if you have a blog website and want to target users only in one specific country then you can go for local domain name extensions. For example, for United States(.us), for India(.in), for Canada(.ca).
Domain name extensions and their meanings – https://www.domain.com/blog/domain-name-extension/
Whatever domain you choose, make sure they’re accredited by ICANN.
This domain registration process is very simple. It will take hardly 5 minutes. After successful registration of the domain, let’s move on to the next step.
Step 2: Choose a Platform
Now, to make a website I’m not going to tell you that go and learn to code. We are going to use some website-building platforms here. Our next step is to pick that platform to build our website.
There are hundreds of website-building platforms to create a website. For example, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, WordPress, etc.
Here is the data of people/businesses on how websites are built.
If you don’t choose a good website-building platform then you’ll end up wasting your time and money. So it’s really important to choose the best suitable website-building platform for your website.
The two most website-building platforms are WordPress and Shopify.
Today, the platform we are going to use for building a website is WordPress.
WordPress is the most popular website building platform and is very flexible. The platform that WordPress provides is beginner friendly. WordPress can be used to build any kind of website, from small business websites to large-scale businesses, from blog websites to e-commerce websites, you can build anything you want with the help of WordPress.
However, Shopify offers a website-building platform to build your online store. Shopify is best suitable for small businesses and individuals who want to open an online store for their business.
The other website builders aren’t bad either. But since I’ve only used these platforms, I can this would be enough for you as well.
Step 3: Start Building Your Website:
Now finally it’s time to start building your website. I suggest you do not skip any steps. Otherwise, your website might not function in the future.
Note: If you get stuck anywhere while building your website, I’m here to help 😊
Setting Up a Website:
How to set up a website using WordPress:
To set up your website, first, you’ll need to sign up with your web hosting provider. Almost all web-hosting services have integrated one-click installation forWordPress. So this WordPress installation will be very easy for you.
Following are the steps you need to follow to install WordPress:
Step 1: Choose a web-hosting service
While creating this website, we’re using BlueHost hosting(recommended). We have been using BlueHost for our website hosting and I can assure you it’s the best. But you can go for any other hosting if you want.
Once you arrive on the BlueHost home page, just simply click on “Get Started Now”. This will redirect you to their hosting plans.
Step 2: Choose a hosting plan
BlueHost offers you primarily three hosting plans. You can choose a hosting plan according to your preference. Choose the basic one if you’re hosting just a single website. Else, you can go with other plans that offer you unlimited website hosting if you want to host multiple websites and target large volume of traffic.
Also all the three plans offers you free SSL Certificate that is awesome. SSL Certificate is really important that authenticates a website’s identity and enables an encrypted connection.
Step 3: Set up your domain name
The next step of website building would be connecting your new domain name with BlueHost hosting. If you’re not sure about the domain name yet, then you can also skip this step.
If you want some more additional help on connecting your domain name with BlueHost, you can follow their official documentation here.
Once you’re done, click “Next”.
Step 4: Create your account on BlueHost
This step is very easy. Just like you fill in any other information for creating an account. Fill out all the information and check your package details at the bottom.
Note: Sometimes BlueHost will automatically select some additional packages for you. Deselect them if you don’t need them.
Before making payment, cross-check all the information, see if everything’s correct, and then click on “Submit”.
Now your account has been successfully created. You can install WordPress on your website now.
Note: Before moving forward, if you think that this article is helpful for you, then please click on at least one of the ads. It motivates us to keep coming up with such great information.
Step 5: Install WordPress:
Once you are logged into your BlueHost account, you should see the following page.
Simply click on “Create your website” button.
On the next page, it will ask you to select the purpose of your website such as Blog, Store, Business, Portfolio/Resume. You can choose according to your preference. If any of the given options don’t fit your purpose of the website, then you can select “Other”.
The next step is to choose the website building platform for your website. BlueHost also has its own website builder but we are using WordPress. So we’ll select WordPress.
Step 6: Start customizing your WordPress website:
Now it’s time to start customizing our website. BlueHost will give you numbers of free themes that we can choose for our website.
Select your preferred theme and let’s move forward.
Note: If you feel to change your theme in the future you can always do that. For that you’ll have to log in to your WordPress and navigate to Apprearance > Themes. From there you can select free themes.
The most popular themes are Astra, Newspaper, etc.
Step 7: Customize your design:
After selecting your favorite theme, now you can go to your BlueHost client area. From this area, you can log in to your WordPress dashboard. You can also add plugins from here.
But for now we need customize our site. So click on “Customize site” button and you’ll land on the visual editor page.
On the left, there is a option bar. This option bar will allow you to modify your website design such as:
- Title and tagline
- Site logo
- Colors
- Fonts
- Widgets
- Background Image
Note: The options will vary according to your website theme.
If you have your own custom CSS then you can also add it to make your website unique.
Once your website’s design is done, now it’s time to move on to content and pages. Don’t worry, you can always customize your site if you don’t like it.
Adding Pages and Content
The foundation of your website is built successfully. Now it’s time to build the main thing of any website, which is the “content”.
Firstly, we’ll build some essential pages for the website such as:
Home
Blogs
Privacy Policy
About Us
Contact Us
These are just some basic pages that any website should have. You may have some additional pages based on your purpose and niche of the website.
Once you’ve decided what pages do you need, let’s add them to the website.
Note: You can build these important pages like Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, About Us, etc using any free page generator.
How to add pages and content to your WordPress website:
To make our website accessible and interesting for users, it is essential to build pages and post content on our website.
A website without any content or pages will be of no use to the users. So it’s important to add some essential pages to the website. There are pages that most websites need, such as a homepage, services, about us, contact us, etc.
In order to add pages to our WordPress website, we need to navigate to the left side menu to “Pages” and from there click on “Add New”.
This will open a WordPress block editor which is called Gutenberg Editor. If you’re visiting this page for the first time, then WordPress will show you a step-by-step tutorial on it works.
It is really easy to use. Everything on WordPress is block-based. This means, that whatever you want to add to your page, you just need to choose the correct block from the menu.
You will find different blocks such as Heading, Paragraph, Image, Table, etc on the left side of the editor. Each block serves a different purpose and adds different visual elements to the page.
And on the right side of the editor, you can customize your page-wide settings like the author, permalink (URL), featured image and etc. If you click on the “Block” then the editor will show settings related to that block.
Once you’re done with customizing the page, you can publish it which will make that page visible to everyone. Or you can also make it private, which will be only visible to you. There’s also an option to preview your page before making it public. You can also publish the page at a certain date and time by choosing the date and time.
Adding Blog Posts:
Now, this step is optional. If you have a business website or an online store then you might not have to publish posts. But if you have a content/blog website then you’ll be posting blogs very often.
First, create a separate, dedicated page for your blog posts. And don’t forget to make your homepage static.
To do this :
- Create a new page (Page > Add New).
- Name it as “Blog” and publish it.
- Then go to Settings (Settings > Reading)
- Select Homepage to “Home” and Posts page to “Blog”
This will automatically display all blog posts on your “Blog” page whenever you publish a new blog.
To create a new blog post every time, go to “Posts” and “Add New”. You’ll be redirected to the editor page where you can start writing your blog.
On the top, you have to give the title of your post then comes the main content. Write a blog, add images, and anything you need for the blog post. Then on the right side, you’ll find options to set the featured image(thumbnail), define an excerpt, etc.
Note: Use YoastSEO or any SEO plugin while writing blogs. That will help you to write seo-friendly articles.
Once you’re done with writing your blog and everything, click on “Publish” and your blog post will be public.
Organizing the Navigation Menu:
Now that you have created the pages, you need to add them to the navigation bar. This bar is located on the top of your website which helps your users to navigate easily through your website.
In order to do that, go to “Appearance” followed by “Menus”.
Now create a new menu. Name it as you want and check the box which says your primary menu. After that you can start adding pages to the menu.
If you want, you can also create sub-items, means these pages will be revealed when you hover over them.
Customizing your website:
To customize your website, you will have to go to “Appearance” on the left side of the WordPress dashboard. You can browse tons of themes from there, add widgets, customize menu’s structure, and so on. Every change that you want to make, can be done under the “Appearance” tab.
In order to make sure that your website works fine, be sure to do the following:
- Browse all your pages one by one, and make sure all the link are working.
- Read your content once before making it public.
- Check your website on different devices such as laptop, tablet, mobile.
- Make sure you have added the SSL certificate.
Congratulations, you’ve finally built your own website from scratch.
Wasn’t that hard, right? Now the most interesting part is that it is not over yet. You will never be satisfied with your website. You will keep making changes very often. Experiment everything and see what works best for you.
Some Golden Tips:
- Submit your website to Google Search Console. (This is really important otherwise your website will never appear on Google)
- Google Search Console also keeps track of all links on your websites and tells you if the links are broken.
- Create Google Analytics account to keep track of your website performance.