How To Build A Website Step By Step

One may be forgiven for thinking that building a website requires expert knowledge and programming abilities that is something best left for the experts.

However, nothing could be further from the truth… with the advent of website builders that do most of the technical work for you behinds the scenes, it’s now easier than ever to build a professional looking website in a very short space of time with very little technical know-how.

Where do I start?

So, where do you begin? The first thing to decide on is which website builder you want to use, as there a few to choose from.

Below is a list of the more popular ones with their pros and cons.

Wix

Wix has become very popular in recent times and for good reason – its ease of use and simple setup make it ideal for those who are new to the field of website building.

Advantages

• More than 300 professionally designed templates that can be customised.
• The Wix editor is very flexible, allowing you to make adjustments to fine-tune virtually everything on your website.
• There is an app market that allows you to add extra functionality to suit your needs – such as an e-commerce store, list building solutions and many more.

Disadvantages

• Doesn’t work so well if you have more than about 30 pages.
• Truspilot only gives it 1.5/5 from 2383 reviews, which is pretty bad… most of the poor reviews seem to be in relation to poor customer service and charging for things without informing the customer.

Pricing

Webnode

Webnode has been around for just over 10 years and has become a big player in the field of online website builders.

It’s very good for anyone who needs a site with multiple languages.

Advantages

• Option of multilingual websites as part of their standard plan – in fact they support more than 20 languages.

Disadvantages

• Limited ecommerce features
• Blogging tool is a little limited, but it’s OK for a simple website.

Pricing

Shopify

Most people will have heard of Shopify with over 1 million worldwide users trusting this platform to run their online businesses.

Shopify is a very good website builder for selling physical products and this is where it excels – it’s arguably the best solution for anyone wishing to both sell online and from a physical location.

Advantages

• Comprehensive Point of Sale (POS) functionality and hardware for making sales at a physical location such as a market stall.
• Abandoned cart recovery – a great function that allows you to identify visitors to your website who only went part way through a purchase and didn’t complete – you can then contact them with an offer (such as a discount code) to try and encourage them to complete the purchase.
• Ability to build you own template if you’re not happy with the ready-made ones.

Disadvantages

• Only 9 free e-commerce templates – this is a very small choice compared to other website builders.
• 64 premium or paid-for templates – still nowhere near the number on offer elsewhere.
• Page editor is a little old-fashioned and doesn’t have drag and drop functionality that other platforms, such as WordPress have.

Pricing

 

WordPress

WordPress is the most dominant content management system (CMS) in the world – with nearly half a billion websites using it.

There’s actually two, quite different versions of wordpress – wordpress.org and wordpress.com.

Here I’m going to be talking about wordpress.org which is a free and open source website builder – wordpress.org is a little different from the previously mentioned website builders, in that it’s a true CMS. The others are website building platforms, that have components and applications that function as part of a CMS, but they are not pure content management systems like wordpress.org is.

With wordpress.org you own your website and all of its data, this means that your site can’t be shut down because someone decides that something you’ve done goes against their terms of service. This is unlike the majority of other online website builders, who own your site and you are paying them for the privilege of using it…

It’s extremely versatile and powerful and has literally thousands of themes making it great for building a very unique site.

There are also over 50,000 plugins, some which are free and others that are paid, allowing you to customise your site to cater for virtually any requirement.

WordPress is also scalable, meaning no matter how big your online business becomes – WordPress will be able to handle it.

Unfortunately it’s not very straightforward to use for newbies and requires a bit of learning to know what you’re doing.

Having said that if you can get the hang of it, it’s arguably the most versatile of the all the website builders and will cater for whatever you need for your website.

The other thing that you will need is to set up a separate WordPress hosting account – but this is actually very easy to do.

Advantages

• Free to download
• Powerful
• Scalable
• Lots of themes
• over 50,000 plugins
• You’re in total control

Disadvantages

• Complicated for beginners
• Requires a separate WordPress hosting account

Conclusion

Thanks to online website builders, building a website from scratch is very easy and can be accomplished by anyone.

In my opinion wordpress.org is the best and most versatile option and really allows you to customise your site in any way you want.

It does need a bit of learning to know how to use it properly and to get the maximum benefit from its multitude of features… but it’s well worth putting in that little bit of effort for the extra long term benefits.

There are lots of ways to learn and plenty of tutorials out there.

In terms of a platform for hosting your WordPress site, there are lots of options – it’s important to remember that not all hosting is equal… you will want something that can handle the traffic that your site will get.

You don’t want you website to run slow and not load quickly – this is the best way to lose potential customers. In this day and age, internet uses don’t have a lot of patience and if your site is taking too long to load, they’ll quickly move on and you’ll have lost them forever.

One of the best WordPress hosting sites is Wealthy Affiliate, which offers industry leading powerful and secure hosting and 24 hour live support for WordPress websites.

Wealthy Affiliate is an online training platform and community that helps people to learn affiliate marketing – but even if you’re not interested in learning about affiliate marketing – you can still use Wealthy Affiliate to host your website/sites at a very competitive price – in fact for one all inclusive price, you’ll get the hosting and a multitude of plugins and features that you would normally have to pay for separately and you get to host up to 50 websites for that one price.

At Wealthy Affiliate you can also learn how to use WordPress along with lots of tips to get the best out of it.

You can read our review of Wealthy Affiliate here, in which we talk about it’s WordPress hosting in more detail.

I hoped you’ve enjoyed this post – if you have any questions or comments, then please post them below and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Mohammad