4 Things You Need When Starting a Website
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While a website used to be an option for a business or professional, now it is essentially a requirement. Whether you are a blogger, artist or other content creator or a company looking for customers, a website is a great way to expand your reach and get a larger audience or customer base.
However, starting up your own website isn’t always easy. Sure, you can pay someone thousands and thousands of dollars to build one for you, but that can be a lot of upfront capital for someone just starting out. With that in mind, this blog post will take a look at four things you need when you are creating your own website.
A Plan of Attack
Before spending any money on software or services and creating your site, you need to have a plan. You need to know what the goal of your site will be, what you want out of the experience, future goals and so much more. This will help you choose what sorts of software and services you actually need.
If you try and design your own site without a plan in place, you risk the site being a jumbled mess and having no cohesion from page to page or section to section. You should research other sites in your niche/industry if you need it, and see what they do well and what they don’t.
A Memorable Domain Name
A domain name is one of the first things you should look into once you know you want to create a website. This domain name is the digital address that people will use to visit your website and get connected to it. These domain names can be purchased from a variety of providers, and will often cost around $20 a year or so.
Your website’s domain name should be memorable, catchy and easy to type in or search. Many website building softwares or websites will give you a free domain name when you build a site, but it often looks more professional to get your own. These are incredibly important, so be sure to put some time, thought and research into your domain name and don’t just pick the first thing you think of, unless it is incredible.
Website Hosting
And last, but certainly not least, you will need hosting for your website. A website host is simply where your website lives online. When your domain name is entered, the internet will grab your website from the host. Without a web host, your site will not be active or live on the internet. There are different kinds of hosting and like the site building software, each will have their own pricing and features.
When you are just starting out you should be fine with shared hosting, but as you get more visitors, you might need to upgrade your hosting as well. There are also different options for different needs. For example, there is Ecommerce hosting if you want to have an online store.
Website Building Software
As you could imagine a website building software is necessary to create and build your website. There are a variety of different options on the market, and your choice will depend on things like pricing, included features, the amount of control you want and more.
If you can code up a website from scratch that is an option as well, but these website builders are quite easy to use and are quite affordable for most people as well. While they often won’t give you full, complete control of everything, most come with a variety of customization options to make your site look and perform however you want it to.
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