Short Guide to Setting Up a Website.
Setting up a website in 2022 has never been easier, with so many web-building platforms to choose from you can have a website up and running in as little as half an hour.
When making a website for the first time you will need to decide on the best platform to build and host your website. Some of the more popular platforms include: WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and Shopify.
Before you jump straight into the website design, it is wise to take a few moments to map out the structure and content of your website. It doesn’t need to be overly complicated, but by creating a visual mind map you will get an idea of what pages your website will have, how these pages should be accessed, what content will need to be prepared, any additional features your website will need and what software builder will be best suited to your needs.
Along with choosing a web-building platform and website layout, you will need to register a domain. Some web-building platforms allow you to register a domain when you are building your site, but you can also buy a domain separately and then link it to your site. Your domain needs to be relevant to your brand and easy to remember, as it is the first thing visitors and customers encounter about you.It’s also worth checking the availability of your desired domain in advance of creating too much branding. If the domain in question is not available or any others similar, you don’t want to have to change lots of content retrospectively.
In order for your site to be live, you will need a hosting platform. Most web-building platforms have hosting already built into their pricing, however, if you need to host your site out with your web-builder it’s worth looking at what options are available to you. Choosing a good hosting platform ensures your website if available to visitors 24/7 with strong performance and functionality.
Once you have purchased and linked your domain, created your site content and you’re ready to launch your website, you need to think about how people are going to find your site. If people search for you directly, great! But most traffic will be organic search via Google or Bing, and you need your site to show up there. One of the first things to do here is have your site indexed. Indexing is Google and/or Bings way of gathering and processing all the data from your site and its pages. You can do this by setting up your Google Analytics and Search Console.
Long term you will need to put some time and effort into improving your sites SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to ensure that you are found on page 1 of search engine results and appear for a variety of relevant searches. There are some things you can do to improve the SEO yourself without being a whizz with code, but if you have the budget, it is definitely worth the investment to have a professional improve the back end SEO of your website.
