Top 3 tips for creating your own website for the very first time
Top 3 tips for creating your own website for the very first time
When it comes to starting your own work at home business, few things are more intimidating than creating your own website for the very first time – especially if you don’t know your way around the technical side of things. While there are many terrific options available for new or inexperienced business owners, getting started can be a bit daunting.
There are a few steps you can take to make your new digital home comfortable and cozy. Today we’re going to look at the top 3 tips for creating your own website for the first time.
1. Purchase Domain
Start by purchasing your very own top level domain. With so many websites offering “free” domain names, this may sound silly and a waste of money.
But most of these free websites are really just giving you a subdomain, such as: yournewbusiness.theirdomain.com. Not only is that difficult for visitors to remember, but if your customers mistype your website address, they could even land on an offensive site or one that contains a virus, costing you your valuable clients.
When you start out by buying your own domain name, it immediately gives your site credibility in the eyes of web visitors.
2. Avoid Free Hosting
Here’s another thing to avoid: free hosting. When you use free hosting (examples: blogger.com, wordpress.com, webs.com, etc.) your site is bound by another company’s terms of service.
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Let’s say you’re running a health and beauty business and your website is being freely hosted. Now let’s say this free host provider suddenly has an influx of spammers taking over the health
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and beauty category.
Suddenly, your top notch website is mistakenly labeled spam and you log on one day to find it’s disappeared – deleted without warning. Your existing customers don’t know where to find you online and you’re losing out on potential customers and sales.
Furthermore, once again, you will most likely have a subdomain, not a top level domain. IE: mysite.theirsite.com, which doesn’t look very professional.
If you can afford it, pay for hosting. It’s really not very expensive any more and you’ll rest easy at night knowing you won’t wake up to discover the website you worked so diligently on suddenly deleted. While you should be paying for hosting, you shouldn’t have to go broke paying for it.
You can get great hosting for between four and ten dollars a month. If you pay more than that, then you’re overpaying. If you pay less than that, you’d better read the fine print very carefully. There’s nothing worse than having your host suddenly go broke because they can’t pay their bills!
3. Build a Pro Site
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Once you have your domain and hosting set up, how can you go about building a professional-looking website with the right search engine optimization that attracts thousands of visitors each day? While it’s true you can pay a web designer for a fancy site with all the bells and whistles, you don’t have to.
You can research free open source software for building your very own website. These CMS (content management systems) even include very professional templates for you to use. Some really good choices are WordPress and Joomla, but there are other good ones, too. Choose one that fits your tastes and creativity best. All are great options to use to for creating your own website and maintaining it day-to-day. And if you get a host that has CPanel like the one we use, installing your new software will be a breeze! It’s as simple as adding your domain name and making a few clicks!
Don’t be overwhelmed
It can seem like a huge task to start a home-based business using the internet. But if you follow
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the top 3 tips for creating your own website as outlined above, you will be up and running in no time!
Just go step-by-step and you will be fine. When you go to the next stage, break it into steps and go step-by-step, again. If you follow this process, you’ll be well ahead of the crowd and on your way to success.
Tell about what you’e doing in the comment section. Remember to leave us your link!
