A website is a must have channel for any business. When it comes to a start-up it is even more critical to have a web presence from day one because you are not going to have resources to build a brick-n-mortar channel nor the marketing budget to spend. There are several approaches you can take to host the website, ranging from dedicated self managed hosting, to managed outsources services to virtual private service such as the one provided by best VPS web hosting. But what does it take to build a website in the first place? Read on to understand some of the steps involved.
Determine Your Website’s Purpose
Start off by deciding whether you want to simply provide your customers with information or if you want to add articles on a regular basis or sell your products or services online. This information will serve as a guide as you move on to develop your website.
Choose Your Web Content Management System
Once you know what you want to do with your website you can choose the software you’ll use. Many content management systems (CMS) are free and you’ll only pay a small amount more for any add-ons you may need.
When developing an e-commerce site for your products, you’ll want to choose between VirtueMart, Magento, osCommerce, OpenCart and Joomla. All of these have templates you can choose from which will affect both their appearance and their functionality. Another really popular one many people use today is WordPress. The main difference between it and Joomla is you have blogging capabilities with WordPress.
Find a Web Host
Next, you’ll need to find a remote location where you can host your website. You can think of this as a storefront. The reason you want to choose this after you’ve chosen your CMS is because you want to make sure your host supports the CMS you’ve chosen. Also, see if your host will set up your CMS for you as this makes it easier on you.
Organising It All
You’ll want to also consider what kind of template and plugins you want to use. Your template is what gives your website its overall look while the plugins provide your website with functionality through things like social networking share buttons, videos, podcasts, surveys, newsletters, and more. This will help you to start building a functional website. Although your template gives each page its overall look, you still need to decide what you want to display on each page. While this all starts with putting together your menu, it’s still important to think about how you want to set up each additional sub menu. Even if you’re not ready to build your entire site today, it’s still important to consider what you want to add in the future.
Developing and Maintaining Your Content
Make sure you develop compelling content for your visitors and in doing so that you’re also conveying the correct information. Don’t overlook the images here either. Of course, these should match your business so that everything looks professional. Typically, you can update these things yourself since most CMS’ have a built-in WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editor that’s easy to use even if you don’t know anything about web programming.
Although this may seem overwhelming to you now, don’t fret it. This entire process is actually easier than it sounds.
