Building Your Own Website
So, you’ve decided to build your very own website without the help of a professional designer or developer. This is possible and achievable, although it does involve you being responsible for every step of the process from start to finish. In this article, I will take you through the process as transparently as possible, allowing you to make up your own mind how you want to go about it.
Remember, we are here to do all this if you decide that you don’t really have the time, or you don’t want to put in so much work, we will do it for you.
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Register your domain name
If you are serious about building your website, you will want to know that the domain name you want is available. This will be the URL of the website that you are building. There are lots of domain name registrars out there, a quick Google search should get you started. Domain registrars usually have a search facility that you can type in your domain name and it will tell you if your domain name is available or not. Having found that your domain name is available, you can purchase the domain name through the registrar. Normally, the domain registration if for 2 years, but could vary from 1 year to 5 years or more. Prices can also vary depending on the domain being registered so it could be worth checking the options being offered.
We can check the availability of your domain name and register your domain on your behalf through our affiliate partners. Click here to make it easy on yourself and have us do the leg work for you.
Find a host for your site
Now that you have registered your domain name, you will need to find a good web host to house your website for displaying. Some things to look for in a good host would be server resources of at least 1GB RAM, the more RAM the better as the site will render faster with more resources. Your host should offer automatic backups, free SSL certificates and cPanel access for maintenance and access to files etc. You can use the cPanel to configure email addresses which will take on the format of user@domainname.xxx. You will need to do some research into the best hosting for your needs and look at user reviews as these can give some insight into how the company deals with issues that may arise. Once you have decided which host you are going to go with, you will need to purchase your hosting package from that company. The cost varies depending on your needs and may be charged monthly or yearly. Once you have purchased your hosting package, you will need to update the DNS servers of the host to point at your domain name. This ensures that other servers on the Internet can find your domain name and where the hosting for the domain name exists.
Let us host your website using our affiliate partners. We will set up your hosting space and point the DNS servers to the correct place. Click here to make it easy on yourself and have us do the leg work for you.
Build a basic site
In order to build your website, you will need to build a basic site that has all of the core functionality to be able to expand and build the site you want. There are a couple of ways to do this, but probably the easiest way is to go into your cPanel and select the install you want. You will find several different systems there from Drupal, Joomla and WordPress content management systems (CMS). There may be more but these are probably the most popular systems in use on the Internet. You choose which system that fits your needs and answer a couple of questions like administrator username and password, where the installation should go and you can even specify the database name and prefix and the system will do the rest. At the end of this process you will have a fully functional website that you can see online by typing in the URL of your domain name. If it doesn’t find your new site, it could be because the domain name is not yet live, hasn’t propagated across the Internet yet or the DNS server isn’t configured properly and servers can’t find you. Just a note, Google searches may take a few weeks to start showing your site in searches even if you have all of your content and SEO in place. If all this worked, then congratulations, you now have a functioning website that you can now design and develop into your website.
Let us install a system in your hosting space according to your needs and requirements. Click here to make it easy on yourself and have us do the leg work for you.
Styling your new website
From this point, I will talk about WordPress as this is the most popular CMS on the Internet to date and has the most support for extensions and plugins that you could want. It is also the most supported for working with third party suppliers so WordPress should be flexible enough for any application that you can think of. If you do happen to find something that is not available, you can always find developers that would be willing to create a plugin for you for a price.
WordPress uses CSS (Cascading Styling System) to keep elements consistent throughout the site. It uses themes to allow you to style these elements and these themes need to be installed into your basic installation in order for these to work. A quick Google search for WordPress themes will result in a staggering amount of themes that are available. Choose a theme according to your needs and install the theme into the themes section of WordPress and activate the theme. If you are going to be editing the Functions.php or adding a lot of CSS overrides, you may want to a bit of research into creating a child theme and activating that as you could find that updates to the parent theme may wipe out any customisations that you have made. Once you have your theme installed, you should be able to edit elements like heading fonts, colours, styles etc. These settings should be available in the customize section of the dashboard of the site. Note: Some themes may not give full access to all elements in the free versions and may require you to upgrade to a pro or paid version to give access to these elements. Research into this should tell you if you need to pay or not. Vendors don’t usually charge for the theme, but for the ongoing updates and are usually a monthly or yearly subscription and you may find that certain vendors package a number of additional plugins that allow the theme to look a certain way on the expectation that the customer will purchase the pro versions of the plugins, to keep it all up to date. Be careful with these as you could be inviting issues further down the track if you only have the free version that doesn’t update to keep up with WordPress and browser changes and web protocols of the future.
Let us determine your theme needs by telling us your requirements and let us determine the best theme for the job. We can also set up a child theme and activate that as well. Click here to make it easy on yourself and have us do it all for you.
Adding plugins for functionality
Now that you have a fully functioning website that is viewable on web browsers, it’s now time to add in some plugins to harden your security, add on SEO and optimizing the site so it renders quickly. Add in page builders and any other plugins to give you the functionality that you require. Configure an analytics plugin to monitor your traffic and see where your users are going on your website and what they are doing. All of this is a process in itself with researching what you need the plugin to do, and then finding the best plugin for the job. A lot of times, you will have to install the plugin and configure it and test if it is suitable for your needs and if not, uninstalling it and trying another one. All of this can take time and effort to get right.
Let us determine your needs and add in and configure your plugins as required. Click here to make it easy on yourself and have us do it all for you.
Finally, adding in content
At this point, you can finally add in your content and decide where and when you want it to display on your site. You can create you pages and posts and have thos display in the appropriate places on the site. You can create your menus and decide where you want them to display. You can decide whether you need a transparent header or whether you want to display a sticky header. You can decide if you want section backgrounds to scroll or remain fixed and decide what transition effects you want to show.
We can design your pages based on the information you give us, to show your page content exactly the way you have imagined it in your minds eye. Click here to make it easy on yourself and have us do it all for you.
Ongoing Maintenance
You have built your website and it is great, so now you can relax, right? Unfortunately, sorry, but no. As great as CMS websites are, they rely on plugins for functionality and these tend to get updated fairly often. Most of the updates are fixing vulnerabilities that the plugin developers find because a hacker has used or found an exploit in code the developer has used. There may be lots of reasons that dev’s update their software, but the simple fact is, that if the OS or a plugin has an update, it is wise to update it or else you may be on the receiving end of the very exploit that the dev has rectified in their update. This means that keeping everything up to date is a very real, time consuming job that really should be done fairly often during the year. There is another issue that arises out of updating, and that is that updating a plugin can cause a conflict with another plugin. This could have disastrous consequences on your website from CSS not rendering correctly to a fatal error that could cause your site to go down and instead simply display a fatal error message on your site to your visitors. To counter this, we build a staging site which is basically a clone of the original site in a sub folder. We then go into this staging site and update all plugins, themes and OS, and if all goes well there and there are no errors, we will then do the same on the main site. If there is a problem on the staging site, the live site will not be affected and we can locate the cause of the issue before updating the live site.
Let us look after the maintenance of your website by making sure that all plugins, themes and Operating Systems are fully up to date. Click here to make it easy on yourself and have us do it all for you.