How to start your own website
Table of Contents
Why do you need to build your own website?
There will be a ton of reasons why you want to start your website and a ton of excuses why you haven’t started one. At the end of the day, everyone wants to do something different other than their daily boring job. Everyone wants to make their life exciting and make every day a new day full of challenges. So, why not start with that idea you have been thinking of for a long time or that business plan you desperately want to start.
There is no one stopping you apart from yourself and your negative thoughts. So, put all those negativities aside, let’s explore why you need to build a website, which niche to target on and the ways to start your own website.
Let’s see what the types are of websites one thinks of building.
Business Website
Suppose you lose your job today and you decide to start a business. You have been dreaming to start your own business for years and narrow down your idea to start your own online business. This can be E-commerce, Content creation, photography, blogging and many more. This all depends on want you want to achieve through your business.
Portfolio Website
This is in case you want to showcase your projects and achievements through an online platform so that they can be accessed by anyone. You want to use these website links when you’re applying to companies and want to design your own layout of your portfolio. This is a great idea for recent graduates and for the people who are switching companies and applying for jobs.
As a Hobby
If you are so much passionate about what you do as time pass, you can think of making a website to showcase your talent. This can be photography, cooking, playing, reading and many more. In the long run, you can use this to get freelance jobs or monetize your website through Ads.
Which niche should I focus on?
This is a very complicated question as the niche which you want can be one and the niche which the audience wants can be another. If you’re interested in photography and your planning to start a website but to get an audience for this niche can be very difficult as the photography niche has a very competitive space.
But the audience for photography equipment “lights’’ can target a few sustaining and recurring audiences for your website, but you don’t want to narrow down your niche. This brings a conflict in your own idea, and this can potentially stop you from starting your own website.
How to start my own website?
As most of us will be from a non-technical background, we may find it rocket science to start a website, but the fact that even rocket science is not complicated is what we need to understand. You need to understand a few steps to start your website. Some key technical terms on the way will help you to understand the concept better.
Read the article on the World Wide Web to know this better.
Register your own Domain
Your domain name is the name people search on the internet to find your website online. It allows your professional presence on the internet. Your domain name should reflect the service of the product you’re offering to your customers. Your type of business or value your offering should also reflect on your domain name.
To register your domain name, you need to find a registrar and check if your domain name is available. If it’s available, you can go ahead and register your domain name. Remember to renew your domain name before it gets expired, as expired domains will be exposed to cybercriminals. Once expired, the chances of getting back the exact name will be minimal if some other person purchases the same.
Find a hosting space
Now you got a name for your website. The next part is to get a space in the World Wide Web to allocate your domain and its contents. Basically, storage space for your website. You will need to find a web hosting company to purchase this space and put all the contents in this space. The price varies with the amount of space and the features that come with the space.
You will need to renew periodically to maintain this space in the world wide web. If it gets expired, you might lose all your data associated with your website.
Prepare your content
Think about what service or value you're going to offer to your audience. This will help you to work out the sections and pages on your site. Make sure your site is structured in a way that users find it very easy to navigate through your site.
You can even hire experts and professionals to design your site, create content and structure your site to optimize SEO possibilities. This creates seamless navigation through your site making your business stand out and users feeling comfortable using your site.
Build your website
You can build your own website or hire professional developers to build it for you. These sites need to be up to date to keep them always running. You can even use website builder which comes with the hosting space packages where it has inbuilt features to design your website.
You need to keep the responsive design in mind while building your website. Responsive design means your site will be working correctly irrespective of the device which your users are using. The site should be optimized to work correctly on smartphones, tablets and desktops.
Ways to Market your website
If your serious about your business, you need to consider marketing your service to reach a greater audience. Without readers and viewers, your website will stumble to its death. To keep it going and growing, marketing is the only way.
Direct Marketing
This can be done when you send email marketing directly to the person, and the person clicks and reads your content or views your service. The marketing where you send the link to the intended person, and he/she clicks to views the content on the site. The other ways are flyers, promotional letters, phone calls, postcards, etc.
Indirect Marketing
This can be done where you go to a third-party site, talk about your service and people come to your site to know more about your products and service. Social Media marketing is a popular platform where people showcase their websites. These include Quora, Medium, Guest posts, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Ways to Monetize your website
Most of the people who start their website doesn’t do it for any social or charity purpose. Their main aim will be to get an income from their website. This can be a full-time income or a side hustle income. There are possibly two ways to get income for your website.
Advertisements
When you put Ads for other products or services on your website, the potential for that ad to reach a wider audience is exponential. Thus, the company whose Ad you are displaying will pay you for promoting their service/products.
There are many platforms that provide you the Ad banner to showcase on your website. One of the popular and easy platforms to use is AdSense. You can use the Ad’s which they offer that runs with CPC (Cost per Click) and CPM (Cost per Mille-1000 impressions) model.
Affiliate marketing
This is by far the best method to gain revenue for your site. If you’re promoting a particular product or service on your site, the company will give a portion of their sales revenue to you if the sales are done by clicking their Ad link on your site. This typically ranges from 1% all the way to 50% of the purchase cost.
One of the popular platforms offering an affiliate program is Amazon affiliate. You have the freedom to promote any product that is featured in the Amazon store as long as they generate the affiliate link to promote. This works even if the buyer buys some other product by clicking the link in the span of 2 hours. Other popular websites for affiliates are impact.com, cj.com and clickbank.com.
What to do after creating the website?
Now you have got a pretty good idea on why you need to start a website, how are the ways to start a website and what are the ways to monetize your website. Considering this in mind, most of the people starting will have very little knowledge on making a website from scratch. I have gone through the same process and found it very difficult.
So, I have decided to help you build your own website by using HostGator as a platform. There are many reasons why I consider HostGator as one of the best platforms to build your site. We’ll discover all these in the below content.
Why HostGator is the best platform to build your website?
I have told you before that you need a domain, hosting and a website builder to make your website live on the World Wide Web. What if I told you, you could get all these features in one platform and in one go?
That is where HostGator comes in. This Platform offers an all-in-one solution to build your website. All the plans provide SSL certificates as default. SSL certificates authenticate the identity of a website and enable an encrypted and secure connection.
If you want to buy a domain and hosting separately, then:
You can check for your domain availability here and carry on with the instructions to purchase your domain.
Once you have purchased your domain, check the hosting space here. I suggest you take Linux hosting since its advantages outrun windows hosting.
But I suggest you take WordPress hosting for your website. This is the one-click solution as it gives a domain, hosting and website builder with the plan. WordPress comes as default to build and customize your website with this plan. Explore the plan here.
An additional feature is that you can use either HostGator website builder or WordPress website builder to customize your site. WordPress can be a better option as it enables a lot of plugins to enhance the user experience on your site.
Use this link to view more offers and Coupons from HostGator.
Additional Tools you might need to start building your website
Last Pass: There will be a lot of passwords when you’re starting out your own business. A great way to keep all your passwords in one wallet is Last pass. Its stores encrypted passwords online.
Skype: Skype is one of the best ways to have professional communication with your clients in a later stage of your business days.
PayPal: PayPal is a money wallet app where you can exchange currencies from international clients and deposit that into your bank account with your local currency.
Canva: Canva is one of the best graphic designing tools where you can design your logo, flyers, banners, postcards, graphics for your website.
Grammarly: Grammarly is a chrome extension where it reviews and assists with your spelling, grammar, punctuation and clarity. It uses AI to identify and search for an appropriate replacement for the mistake it locates.