How to Build your Own Website

Building a website can be a daunting task, but it can be an enjoyable and rewarding experience with the right tools and resources.

In this blog post, I’ll outline the process of building your own website from start to finish. I’ll also provide tips and advice to help you create a website that is both professional and reflective of your brand.

So, whether you’re a first-time entrepreneur or just looking to revamp your existing website, read on for our step-by-step guide on how to build a website from scratch!

When I first started an online side hustle (beads) and wanted to have my own website to organize and publish all my products, I learned that hiring someone to design and develop a website is costly!

So, I came up with the idea to study how to do it on my own. And put that money supposed to be spent on the website for my inventories.

Looking back, it’s one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life. Not only have I learned how to do a website, but I have used that new skill set to do freelance and earn extra money.

Also, it spawns other skill sets such as SEO or search engine optimization, copywriting, and many others.

If you don’t have a budget to hire someone to do a website for you right now, you can follow this article on how to build your own website.

Let’s begin.

Content

1. What is a website?
2. Choose a name for your new website
3. Find a Good Web Hosting Company
4. Pick a Domain Name
5. Purchase Web Hosting and Domain
6. Install WordPress (your blogging platform)
7. Find and install a WordPress theme
8. Customize your new theme
9. Install Essential WordPress plugins
10. Create your first page or post
11. Publish the page or post
12. Connect the page or post to WordPress Navigation Menu
13. Test the responsiveness of the website

1. What is a website?

A website simply means an online site or place on the web. You have complete control of what to write or post on it and publish it worldwide!

Website is one of the essential tools for entrepreneurs. It serves as your online business card and storefront. They can be used to promote your business, sell products and services, and connect with customers. A good website will help you grow your business, while a bad website can hurt your reputation and sales. That’s why it’s crucial to invest in a professionally designed and coded website that accurately represents your brand.

2. Choose a name for your website

Most of the time, you will use this as your domain name (or URL – this is what you can see on top of the Google browser, e.g., www.startupsfailures.com). It takes time to choose a name for your new blog. Most of the time, the name you can think of has been used already. So, I suggest that you use a combination of your name and what your blog is all about. At the end of the day, it’s not the name that counts but the massive value you offer. Like the name “Apple,” who would think it could be a tech company name?

Have a name for your website? Click on the button below. When you’re on that page, click on Domains in the navigation menu.

Pick a name for your site.

3. Find a Good Web Hosting Company

A web hosting company will serve as a place where you will store all the content of your website, such as videos, texts, images, links, etc.

Personally, I have used Bluehost (Recommended) over the years. It’s reliable, easy to use, uptime is high, cost-effective, excellent customer service, etc. On top of that, they always have a promotion for their customers!

4. Pick the Best Domain Name and search in Bluehost if available

What is a domain name? A domain name is the location of a website. You can see this in the URL bar of a web browser when you visit a website.

Again, the name of your blog is usually the domain name. Now, go to Bluehost, and under the main menu that you can see on the upper left, click on the “Domains” link. When you’re on that page, you can input the name that you think of in the search bar and then click the search button. You can see whether the domain name is available or not.

Click here to learn more on How to Choose the Best Domain Name.

Tip! Go for .com and not .net, .org or another top-level domain unless your website is about education (use .edu) or organization (use .org). Also, users or readers usually type .com at the end of a blog name.

5. Purchase Web Hosting and Domain

So, what is web hosting? Web hosting is a service that allows individuals or organizations to create and post a website or web page (whether it’s a blog, eCommerce, etc.) onto the Internet. Website contents such as photos, videos, infographics, text, etc., are hosted or stored on servers of the web hosting company (e.g., Bluehost). When someone wants to view your website or blog, all they need to do to access or view it is to type your website domain name into their web browser (e.g., Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, etc.) URL bar. The web hosting company servers then will connect to their computer, and your website or blog will be delivered to them through the browser.

If the domain name you chose is available, sign up for the Basic Plan in Bluehost. Tip! Go for a 3-year plan to save money because if you choose one year only, you might pay for the regular price after one year, and there might not be a promotion just like right now.

6. Install WordPress (your blogging platform)

What is WordPress? WordPress is an application or software that you can use to create and publish a website or blog online. It’s a powerful tool to use for eCommerce, blogging, etc. In a technical term, “WordPress (WP, WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database.”

How to install it? You can use this step-by-step guide from Bluehost.

7. Find and install a WordPress theme

What is a WordPress theme? In a simple explanation, a WordPress themes is an overall layout and design that you can see on a website. You can use it to customize the appearance of your website or blog, such as the theme color, design elements, typography, etc.

There are many different themes available that you can use for FREE. When you install WordPress, you can choose from one of these pre-made free themes, or you can create your custom theme.

On my end, I had used a premium theme, Elegant Themes, when I created this blog that you’re reading. I have been using Elegant themes since 2010 on my other websites. It’s easy to customize and design and has many pre-made templates, etc.

If you’re planning to create a new website or revamp your existing website, you know that a well-designed, well-coded, easy-to-customize website is essential to reach new customers and grow your brand. But if you’re like most business owners, you don’t have the time or money to hire a web designer to create a custom website for you. That’s where Elegant Themes come in.

Elegant Themes is a popular WordPress theme provider that offers beautiful and versatile designs that can help your side hustle or business shine online.

It offers a lot of beautiful templates that are easy to customize and install. Plus, their prices are unbeatable! So if you’re looking for a high-quality WordPress theme that won’t break the bank, then Elegant Themes is the provider for you.

8. Customize your new theme

You can customize your new theme if you want to or use a pre-made template from that theme that you don’t have to design or customize. It will really save you a lot of time and effort not to customize your website when you first start.

Elegant Themes has well-documented resources on how to customize its themes.

9. Install Essential WordPress plugins

WordPress plugins are a great way to add features and functionality to your website. There are a seemingly endless number of WordPress plugins to install to help power up your website. But with so many options, it can be hard to determine which ones are the best for your growing business.

To make things a little easier, I’ve put together a list of the essential WordPress plugins for your new website.

So whether you’re looking to improve your SEO, add social media buttons, make your website load faster, or just keep track of your website stats, there’s a plugin here for you.

A. WP Rocket. It’s a powerful WordPress plugin that can help you improve your website’s speed and performance. A fast website means a better user experience, which can lead to more conversions and sales. WP Rocket is a caching plugin for WordPress that can give your website a performance boost. It speeds up the loading of pages by caching static files and eliminating render-blocking JavaScript and CSS.

B. Yoast SEO. It’s a plugin for WordPress that helps you improve your website’s SEO ranking on Google. It guides you through the process of optimizing your website with simple steps and provides feedback on your progress. If you want to rank higher in Google and attract more visitors to your site, then Yoast SEO is a tool you need to use.

C. Social Snap. Are you looking for a way to improve your social media marketing? If so, Social Snap may be the tool for you. Social Snap is a platform that allows you to optimize and automate your social media posts. With it, you can save time and increase your online presence.

10. Create your first page or post

There are many different ways to create content on your WordPress site. I will show you how to make your first page or post at this point. This is the basics stuff that you need to know to get started. So let’s dive in!

A. How to create a blog post or page on your website. To write a blog post or page, log in to your WordPress Dashboard, go to your WordPress dashboard and click on the Pages » Add New. Then add or enter the title of your page or post and the content of your page or post in the text editor. Click on the Publish button when you’re done editing. Your page or post will be published and live on your website!

B. Create a compelling title. The first thing your readers will see is the blog post’s title. That’s what brought them into the article in the first place. They clicked a hyperlink or image (with a link to your blog post) that you’ve posted on social media or other media simply because you got their attention and got interested due to the title. So, spend more time creating that title.

C. Add appealing graphics like photos, videos, infographics, etc. These will capture your audience’s attention and provide more life and sound design to your blog post to keep your readers longer in your blog. But primarily, these will help them visualize and understand the topic easily on hand. Tips! Don’t forget to optimize those graphics so the load time of your blog post will not be slow!

o Where to find photos? You can use sites like Unsplash, iStock, or Shutterstock to improve the user experience of your website through those photos. They offer free and premium images.

o What is the ideal number of images or videos to add? It depends on many factors, such as how many you are going to include, how big or heavy the photos or videos are, and whether your blog post’s load time is affected. Another factor is how willing you are to pay for a premium plugin like WP Rocket to make your website load faster (especially if you’re planning to upload more pictures)? Also, how long is the blog post, and what type of blog niche do you have.

Many bloggers out there say one image per 150 words; well, I’m thinking, if you have an eight-thousand-word blog post, that would be around 54 photos! And if you don’t have any premium plugin to speed up the load time of your website, it would be a disaster!

So, bottom line, I can’t answer this for you. At the end of the day, you have to consider the many factors I’ve mentioned above and decide wisely from there.

D. Add relevant internal links. Internal links are links from one of your pages to another page on your website of the same domain. Again, this will help your web pages not to stand alone or be recognized by a search engine to be a separate website or web page from the rest of your web pages. Also, adding relevant internal links will make your audience stay longer on your blog. You can add at least 2-3 internal links per blog post for higher ranking power.

E. Create an Effective Call-to-Action.

o What is a call-to-action for? A call to action or CTA is what you want your readers or audience to take after reading your blog or article. It’s usually written in a column of a blog page with a button or hyperlink that indicates Sign Up or View Work.

F. Create an opt-in form.

o What is an opt-in form? An opt-in form is a way you can collect email subscribers from your blog. Upon getting their email address and name, you can add them to your email list. You can contact them through email whenever you have a new blog post, free training, or promotion.

11. Publish the page or post

Publishing a page or post in WordPress is an easy process that can be completed in simple steps. I will show you how to publish your content and make it available online.

Actually, while creating a blog post or page, you can see the Publish button on the top right or bottom right of the editor.

You can choose to Publish or Draft the page or post you have created right away.

There’s also an option to preview your page or post before publishing it to ensure that your content looks great.

12. Connect the page or post to WordPress Navigation Menu

If you’re running a WordPress site, it’s essential to know how to connect your pages and posts with menus. This will make it easy for your visitors to find what they’re looking for and help keep your site organized.

Don’t worry because it’s easy to connect pages and posts with menus.

You can easily add pages, posts, custom links, and categories to the menus by default.

So what do you need to add to the navigation menu? Usually, you can add the home page, about us, blog, contact us page, etc.

So, how to connect your pages and posts to the menus?

For starters, go to the dashboard of WordPress and click on the Appearance then Menu.

Under Add menu items, you can see four tabs, namely, Pages, Posts, Custom Links, and Categories.

For example, if you want to add a page, click the tab Pages (expandable) to find it, tick on the page you want to add then click the Add to Menu button below.

You can see the page you just added at the bottom-right-side of the screen.

After adding the page, you can drag and drop that page or other pages to adjust their display order to the navigation menu.

After connecting the page or post to WordPress Navigation Menu, go to your website’s home page to see the changes you have made.

13. Test the responsiveness of the website on multiple devices

One of the most important aspects of website design is to ensure that it is responsive and looks good no matter what device it is viewed on using different browsers.

You might think that testing this can be difficult, as you need to have access to various devices. However, nowadays, there are a lot of applications that you can use to easily do this, such as Google DevTools Device Mode, Responsive Web Design Tester, etc.

Conclusion

I hope you found this article on How to Build your Own Website to be beneficial.

If you have any questions, please write a comment below.

What to do next?

1. Submit Your Website to Search Engines
2. Set up Google Analytics for Your Website or Blog