So you want a website, eh?
There are a myriad of reasons you might want to create a website, but it’s not always obvious where to start. The good thing is you don’t really need to be a designer or a developer anymore. This is not a step-by-step guide, but merely a place to start exploring if you’re serious about it.
What Web Address Do You Want?
Choosing the right web address is very important. These are also referred to as domain names or URLs. First, make sure it’s memorable. Luckily Google Search will help you in the event someone can’t remember the domain name, but you’ll have to have a good internet presence with your site in order for them to find you. Ideally, choose a name that is, or closely resembles, your company name. Make sure it is as short as possible and has no silent characters like hyphens, for example. You’ll want to make sure your audience can simply type in what they hear you say when you tell them about it in person or on radio ads. Get a domain that ends in .com if you can. Even though many new domain extensions like .net and .io are around, they’re still not the ones people guess first. I recommend starting your domain search at GoDaddly.com to see what’s available. You’ll be able to purchase your domain for under $10 a month and they always have promo codes for additional savings so be sure to search for those before purchasing.
Find a Host?
So you have your shiny new domain name and are ready to publish some content. Well, you’ll have to figure out where all of the files for your website will live. This is called the host. There are many out-of-the-box website systems such as Weebly, SquareSpace, Wix that will eliminate the need to find a host, and these are great options for first-timers. But if you’re going for a more flexible solution you may want to continue a hosting company that will allow you to choose whether you want a Windows or Linux server, a dedicated or shared server, or even a high-powered cloud solution such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). For my clients, I’ve had really good luck with Hostek and EPhost. Their service is awesome and they are both very reliable. Hosting won’t cost you much more than $25/mo. if you’re doing it yourself. Once you choose a host you’ll be able to link your domain name, setup your new email addresses, and get started with setting up your site.
Find the Right Platform
There are more web content management systems (WCMS) than you can count. The list would make your head spin so I’m going to mention some of the ones I’ve used and I’ll let you know why or why not to consider them. As I mentioned above, it won’t hurt you to use one of the canned website platforms. They were designed for non-technical users and are generally pretty user-friendly. You may find, however, that you’re limited in templates that meet your design standards or ones that will be unique to your site. In other words, anyone and everyone can use them so how will you stand out? I often choose options that are flexible and scalable. Here’s an overview of the ones I’ve chosen to use.
Mura – My favorite free ColdFusion-based WCMS of all time. Although the community is small and not very active, it’s well organized, stable, and easy to use, which you’ll find is not true for many WCMS platforms. You’ll want to have a good web designer handy to create a set of design templates to use, preferably one who can incorporate the ColdFusion placeholder tags if you can’t do it yourself.
WordPress – Perhaps the most common WCMS today is WordPress. They claim 42% of websites use their platform. It has a robust and active community for support, templates, plugins and many hosting companies have simple setup options for you. Most of their templates are responsive, meaning they work well on any device and browser. WordPress is fairly intuitive to use too. I’d give it a B+. One thing to watch out for with WordPress is that it’s a big target for hackers because of its popularity. Not dissimilar from how Windows computers are more targeted than Mac computers just on the premise that they can get more people if they figure out how. WordPress is the newest platform for me and it’s growing on me fast. I would definitely recommend it at this point.
Joomla! – I use this one because it’s free, open-source, and relatively common amongst hosting providers. It was also one of the first mega-scale WCMS available along with its cousin Mambo when websites became a thing. Usually, you can check a few boxes within your host’s control panel and you have it up and running right away. You’ll be able to find a bunch of templates, and the user/support community is still fairly active. I will say this about Joomla though; the usability is awful. It’s as if the system was designed by aliens. It’s not intuitive, nor is it easy to update for security, etc. You’ll probably want to steer clear of this one.
CommonSpot by PaperThin – This was my first commercial-grade WCMS and it showed. It was very customizable, but we needed a consultant to come in and help get it up and running. This was pricey. We chose to use them because our development language of choice was Adobe’s ColdFusion. This would allow us to integrate and bolt on whatever we needed to make a seamless user experience… or so we thought. It was much more complicated than we’d have liked it to be due to the way their database was organized. Like most WCMS providers, they now offer a hosted solution, which would have made implementation much easier.
Adobe Experience Manager – Adobe is one of my favorite company’s of all time. I’m not going to lie, I’ve been way into everything they offer since about 2004 when I attended my first of over a dozen MAX conferences. This is definitely an industry-grade solution for large corporations. It’s scalable, user-friendly, uses AI, cross-platform friendly, and is backed by Adobe and their incredible community of creators. It isn’t cheap. Adobe didn’t always have a WCMS solution and acquired a WCMS that I evaluated years ago by a company called Day Software. Today they’re a leader in the space.
Want to Sell Stuff Online?
I’ve used Magento and Slatwall, but the only e-commerce platform I’d recommend right now, especially for DIY folks, is Shopify. Having implemented about a dozen Shopify sites I can say that it’s intuitive, fairly priced, and can do anything you want it to do. It has a rich community of designers and developers with plugins that will help with advanced tasks such as product customization for things like t-shirts, shipping, promotions, and much more. They have outstanding documentation to get you started and a partner program for you to find someone to help if you need it. Payment integration is simple and they make sales tax integration as easy as it can be too. If you want to set up a pop-up store and sell your goods at local fairs or festivals there’s no other platform that will allow you to do this with such ease. Don’t waste your time looking elsewhere at this point unless you’re heavily invested in another system that Shopify just won’t work with.
Know Your Site
Once you get your site up and running you’ll probably want to know what your visitors are doing. How are they finding you? What are they doing when they get there? What are they searching for? How long are they staying? What pages are they exiting your site from? How many are there? You can get all of this information for free by implementing Google Analytics. If you want to up your game a bit you can even do it using Google’s Tag Manager for added functionality such as A/B testing in case you want to present varied content to your users and see which is most effective. Tag Manager will allow you to manage any Google tags you want to embed on your web pages without having to go into the code each time you make a change. Very convenient. I’ve used other commercial analytics solutions such as WebTrends, Omniture SiteCatalyst (now Adobe), and Urchin before Google bought them.
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