Well, irrespective of what your business passion is, a well-crafted website does help the users get a holistic view about your business operations, services offered and the range of business solutions you proffer. A website thus plays a very significant role in determining the progression of a business. And so, this article summarizes all the important key points step-by-step that you need to consider while creating a website.

Where do I Begin?

For creating a website, you have to perform three basic tasks. Firstly, sign up for website hosting. Secondly, choose a domain name (i.e. www.yourname.com). Thirdly, create your website.

Now the question is how? There are a great number of website-building platforms you could choose to create your website, for instance, Wordpress, Wix, Joomla and Drupal to name a few.

Choosing an Appropriate Web Hosting Platform and Domain Name

What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is an internet service/technology which allows individuals and organisations to add there website to a space in the website and hence they can show it to the world through internet. It is an effective medium which showcases your website to a large group of people worldwide thus informing them about your nature of business, services and solutions you offer.

Opting for a suitable web-hosting provider matching to your business needs is not as easy as it seems. An in-depth research and reading about the various web-hosting channels will certainly help you in gauging as to which provider will complement the growth of your business. Remember, there are a plethora of web hosting companies which offer services on payment. The prices differ from company to company. Most of the companies insist you on installing the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate for your site. A few companies offer this certificate free of cost while the others charge a minimal fee for using it on your website.

It is to be  noted that one of the prime factors that may influence your choice is the decision on whether to use SSL for your website. Let me alert you as to what difference does the installation of SSL make in your site. A site that uses SSL will have a web address starting with "https://" instead of "http://". Earlier, the webmasters used it if they were selling goods and services and needed to collect credit card numbers from users, or if they had some sort of facility that required their visitors to log in with a password as an added security. But now it is one of the ranking signals and Google pushes it as one of the must-haves and calls it the future of the web.

What is a Domain Name?

A domain name is an identification address of your website. For instance, www.yourname.com is called the domain name of your website. It is of paramount importance that you choose an effectual domain name for your website. 

Tips on Choosing a Favourable Domain Name

• Keep in mind that the domain name you choose for your website should be simple and short.
• Domain names are unique and exclusive. You can only select a domain name which is not opted by any other user. If the domain name you selected is already taken, stress not, as you can add in an adjective, noun or a verb to it. For instance, trailblazers.com will definitely be taken but trailblazersventuring.com is something new.

Domain Registration

After you have decided on a suitable domain name for your website, it is fundamental that you register. You can do your domain registrations through any of the domain registrars. ICANN is the authority in this space and manages all the activities happening around DNS. There is a minimal registration fee applicable which allows you to use it for a year and later you will have to renew it annually if you wish to continue with the services.  

How Do I Register?

• Choose a domain registrar satisfying your business needs and requirements.
• Pick a potent domain name based on the business services and solutions you cater to.
  
• Once you have chosen your domain name, you can either use your debit card or Paypal account to pay for your domain name and register your website with the web host provider.

Some of the best registrar include GoDaddy, Namecheap , Bluehost, 1and1 and BigRock to mention a few. Among these, BigRock is a the leading registrar if you are based in India. When you are a beginner saving some bucks would always help, you can make use of coupons or first user deals in such cases. A rough googling for bigrock coupons or offers would the job if you are opting Bigrock.

Designing Your Web Pages

After you have successfully chosen a sound web hosting company and registered your domain name with it, the next step involves designing your web pages.

Before you begin the designing process, there are a few points to be considered. Firstly, it is important that you get yourself acquainted with how to publish a basic web page online. Secondly, you can make use of a variety of web editors for designing your web pages. Web editors offer free services and also provide a tutorial for the new users to help them understand the nuances of designing for a website. Thirdly, after you have followed the tutorial, it is important to note that the search engine readiness plays a very crucial role and has to be looked into in the designing stage itself.

You could opt for Wordpress as a beginner as it is the most widely used CMS worldwide. Wordpress is easiest for the beginners and you wouldn't need to do any coding as most premium themes or even free themes available online would be equipped with drag and drop. Finding a right theme and doing a bit drag and drop will make be a cakewalk for you.

Below are some of the tips that will help you in making your website search engine friendly.

• Eliminate duplication of content.
• Make it website ready for mobiles.
  
• Make use of straight HTML navigation links.
• Create relevant title tags.
• Add suitable texts, images and videos to your site.
  

Testing Your Website

Testing of your website should be done throughout the web design cycle. It is mandatory that you test your web pages on various web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer. Testing your site directly is the only way you can be really sure that your web pages are designed as the way you wanted it on your visitors' machines. In addition to these, you can also try out your site on a smartphone.

Summing up

The above-mentioned points indeed act as a mainstay which helps you in optimizing your business operations efficiently and intelligibly. As Dr Christopher Dayagdag rightly puts, “Website without visitors is like a ship lost in the horizon.” Hence, website creation and design play a vital role in drawing users from all over the world and so, it is of utmost importance that you create and design your website impeccably. If you still find that you would need assistance our web development team at MindStick may help. Feel free to get in touch and we can take this ahead.