How to Make a Website From Scratch (A Beginner’s Guide, Step-by-Step)
The importance of having a web presence for a business has perhaps never been higher in the data-driven, digital-first corporate environment of today. A website is a quick and simple method for a company to grow its customer base, establish its reputation, and stay competitive.
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Building a website may be intimidating for new companies, and those without prior expertise could feel lost. Luckily, you can create a simple company website on your own with the correct planning.
We’ll go over how to create a website from scratch in this post. Before you begin, please be aware that although this book is meant for beginners, it will cover several steps that can call for intermediate to expert knowledge of web building and coding.
How to Make a Website in 10 Easy Steps From Scratch
Even though it takes a lot of work, creating a website from scratch is a terrific method to make sure it reflects the objectives of your business. By doing this, you can really apply your own vision right from the start, customizing things like the site’s overall usability, navigation, and aesthetics.
Here are 10 essential stages for creating a website from scratch.
1. Develop and Match Related Skills
It’s crucial to assess your key required talents, mainly those related to web development and coding, before you start designing your new website. These abilities may be quite helpful when building a do-it-yourself website since they enable you to take care of important technical stages on your own, which might facilitate a quicker development process and provide you more creative freedom.
Debugging and troubleshooting (to make sure your site is consistently effective, up to date, and free of critical security flaws) and search engine optimization (also known as SEO) (to effectively optimize and market your site so it is discoverable and competitive within Google’s search algorithm) are helpful prerequisites for website development. Coding in languages like JavaScript and HTML/CSS is also helpful for various design and usability factors.
Proficiency in both front-end and back-end web development is very advantageous as it enables you to comprehend and handle issues related to client-facing usability as well as the underlying site architecture at a deep, technical level. Take a look at our how to become a web developer guide to get started in the field.
2. Define Your Objective
After your core competencies are in line, you should set a general objective for your new website. Consider this: What is the long-term goal of this website? Is the goal to sell goods? to convey and amplify the identity of your brand? What kind of user experience are you trying to offer? Which user metrics are you going to monitor on the website?
After you have addressed all pertinent queries, designing the site’s user interface, visual elements, possible pages, and other elements that are closely related to your objectives ought to be simpler. For example, you may design a home page that provides quick access to corporate updates, highlighted online items, and identity-based information (such a thorough “About Us” section) if your goal is to utilize the website to promote your brand and ease online transactions. Whatever your vision, be sure to be as specific as explicit as you can with your objectives.
3. Select a Web Hosting Company
Selecting a hosting company is a simple yet important step in building a website. Leading hosting companies (like Bluehost and HostGator) have sped up this process and frequently provide free domain registration, cheap website builders, and other benefits to new users.
Similar to the last stage, your needs and objectives for the website should guide this choice, particularly those that pertain to usability and site structure. For instance, you should select a platform that offers enough speed and room for larger files if the website is meant to display multimedia and image galleries. With the help of these parameters, you should be able to reduce the number of potential suppliers to a manageable number and assess which ones would best suit your business’s needs in terms of reliability, affordability, and alignment.
4. Select a Domain Name
In principle, choosing a domain name for a website might be quick and easy, but as GoDaddy points out, the process is similar to choosing a business name. Given that your domain name will be a major component of your online persona, it might take some careful planning. From an SEO standpoint, having a catchy domain name may help search engines find your website more easily and facilitate the promotion of your website through digital marketing initiatives.
Keeping this in mind, dedicate some time to come up with a few domain suggestions. Research keywords and perform further market analysis to identify a name that is succinct, memorable, and representative of the service or good you are offering. In addition to representing your target demographic or geography, your domain name should be memorable and catchy (you could even want to put your location right in the domain name).
5. Select a Site Layout or Template
The design of your website’s layout will play a crucial role in enabling the intended user experience, therefore much thought and study should go into its selection. To begin, select a website builder that offers a variety of suitable site templates. Then, narrow down your selections to those with designs and layouts that align with your ideas. These factors might include if you require appointment scheduling, e-commerce features, or other essential company functions. Use the theme as a framework for more ambitious development concepts, such as specialized plugins and widgets, color schemes, and page structure, assuming you can modify it to your desire.
6. Create Content-Related Pages
The most successful websites include a lot of pages or parts, usually a main page and multiple auxiliary pages that highlight various areas of the business. These pages serve as the main foundation of your website and should be easily navigable and accessible. They should also be structured and arranged in a way that aligns with the planned user experience. You should be able to add, delete, and edit pages within your overall site theme if you are using a website builder. Make use of this feature to design pages that collectively communicate the goal and message of your website.
Take NASA’s main website, for instance. It features a multifunctional front page along with readily navigable, logically organized sections pertaining to the organization’s history, current missions and projects, downloads, and social media channels. Users of NASA benefit from such a model as it provides them with all pertinent information efficiently and promptly. It is imperative that you take a similar strategy when developing your website, regardless of the name or specialty of your business. Simply concentrate on creating logical page divisions and refrain from overwhelming readers with information in one area.
7. Set Up a Payment Process (If Needed)
If the purpose of your website is to facilitate online buying, make sure it has a suitable storefront layout that highlights the goods and services offered by your business. For retail-oriented websites, seamless digital transactions are typically seen as a make-or-break feature, so make sure to build your shop appropriately. To begin with, the majority of prosperous online stores accept a range of payment options, including debit and credit cards as well as linked services like PayPal and Google Pay.
Furthermore, the foundation of your payment system should be safe, rapid, and smooth payments that foster confidence and a sense of fluidity. This feature can increase the number of items or services that are being considered for purchase and improve your website’s bounce rate. You may also utilize features like sticky header navigation, which is a kind of header that stays in place when customers scroll, providing them with continuous access to alternatives for browsing and making purchases. Customer loyalty and trust may be significantly increased by providing a simple and pleasant user experience; the most successful digital stores are miniature representations of this idea.
8. Evaluate and Optimize Your Website
Now that the essential components of your website are in place, you should spend some time testing and optimizing the finished version. The usability of a website is still one of the best measures of its performance in 2021, therefore its user interface (UI) and delivered user experience (UX) should be its top priorities. Technical audits of the front and back ends of the website as well as usability testing can be used to evaluate these components. Watch people while they navigate your website and record any errors, misunderstandings, or other shortcomings that are brought to light. This is a good technique to assess usability. To obtain similarly in-depth feedback and stronger solutions, ask thorough questions that will improve the customer experience overall. Regarding technical audits, evaluate different SEO elements (including content optimization, organic keyword mentions, and functioning backlinks), site performance metrics (like page speed and multimedia playing), and issues with the site’s underlying code.
9. Advertise Your Website
It’s time to get your website in front of the people you want to see it for once it is live. Fortunately, there are a lot of efficient digital marketing strategies for websites. Social media profiles are an excellent resource for increasing site visibility. A lot of these platforms enable users to easily lead followers to various website pages, syndicate material from the sites, and connect directly to the URLs of the sites. Numerous site styles allow for the direct embedding of social links, which is advantageous from an SEO perspective for all linked entities because organic linking raises ranking authority.
Other alternatives include using Google’s business and advertising tools, which may assist site owners in marketing their properties through targeted adverts and, if applicable, obtaining the inclusion of relevant physical places on Google Maps (along with connections to their websites). Webmasters can expand their website’s reach into other social marketplaces by creatively utilizing site multimedia. An online video, for example, may be syndicated to social media platforms along with a link to the original material.
See this Ahrefs list of free website promotion strategies for further details on rapid, low-cost methods for website marketing.
10. Update your website regularly
Make sure you maintain your website updated even after it has been created and gained some popularity. As your website gains popularity, people may ultimately become weary of or lose interest in it due to out-of-date information and poorly maintained site usability elements (broken links, malfunctioning multimedia, etc.). Thus, it is essential to maintain the activity of your website, which extends beyond simple blogging and uploading.