It might be tempting just to let someone else handle the development technicalities of your website. However, the latest advancements in web hosting have minimized the whole process to a few basic steps.
Today we will discuss those steps and the most popular options in each step. Let us start by first realizing why we would choose to create a website from scratch in the first place.
Why Create A Website From Scratch?
You might be wondering why even go down this road when there are so many other options available. Go through the following points to have your answer:
Uniqueness and Creative Freedom
When you have full control of the nits and grits of your website’s look and feel, it inspires you more to unleash your creativity. If you create the site from scratch, there will be no boundaries for you to play with your skills and imagination.
You can materialize all your visions on the computer screen. You can figure out which one among the thousand web design options fits your particular taste and branding.
As a result, the website turns out to be completely different from all other competitors. Because most other sites rely on a pre-packaged theme, your self-created webpage looks unique to all the visitors. This can result in higher traffic and a strong fan-base from the beginning of your journey.
Manageable and Efficient Coding
Since you do not depend on a backend developer or frontend developer to code the website, you can make the whole process a lot more efficient. You will not need any developer to explain the algorithm or coding structure.
This will save you from the need to schedule recurring meetings with them only for this purpose. Whatever change you need on the website, you can handle it yourself. You can also remove any excess data in the code or an unnecessary variable that would take up space. This will cause the web pages to load faster and thus improve in performance.
Easier Problem-Solving
From debugging to resolving a design glitch – all the intricacies of the website will be under your control. As a result, you will not need to spend time on going back and forth with the assigned developers about the problem details and its possible solutions. So the problem-solving phases will eat up much less time.
Although if you are a beginner-stage programmer, this might not work in your favor and end up taking more time than usual. In that case, go for a website builder or hiring a developer team.
If you want to assign developers soon for handling these activities, you can walk them through your code effortlessly since you know it entirely from the inside out. To make the new developer’s life more comfortable, you can add comments to the code and write proper documentation throughout the development period.
Optimized Performance
As you are managing the code by yourself, you can eliminate any unnecessary data. So the website performance will reach higher standards through the absence of all clutters like unused libraries and frameworks. In the end, this will leave only the essential pieces of code. Then the website will run with much lower weight and time-consumption ensuring high efficiency.
Skills Improvement
You will be envisioning the final product and working on building it at the same time. To pursue the required features, you will need to search online and find the most efficient code implementation frequently. This will open up many doors of knowledge for you which you would never stumble upon otherwise. As a result, your skills as a programmer will improve exponentially.
The Five Steps
Now that you know the benefits of creating a website from scratch, lets now discuss each step of the process in details below:
First: Choose Web Host and Hosting Package
Web host or hosting provider refers to the company who will provide your website a host – the house where it will reside. The hosting package may also include a free domain (the home address) and other technical resources (the home’s utilities).
Among the resources, the most crucial ones are storage space (SSD is more preferable than HDD), RAM, CPU cores, bandwidth, MySQL databases and email accounts. Many leading web hosts provide multiple resources in unlimited amounts and at cheap rates simultaneously.
The hosting packages may include shared, VPS, dedicated and cloud hosting. Know about each of these hosting variations here. For beginners, shared hosting will be the safest bet since it is the most affordable and does not require high technical expertise. Also, selecting a hosting package with free domain registration will make the whole process a lot easier (more on that in the next point).
Second: Domain Name Registration
Think of a unique domain name which will reflect the category of your website and inspire the viewers to click URLs leading to your site. It will be a good idea to do SEO research on the most effective keywords before making the final decision.
Once decided, go forward with the plan and register the domain name. You can do so by contacting a domain registrar. However, the better option would be to choose a web hosting plan that deals with the domain name registration hassle on your behalf.
Third: Prepare The Interface Design
Before you go straight for the implementation, first sketch out a few blueprints of what the site should look like. This does not include only the homepage of your website, but every other page you want there. For example – About Us, Contact Us, Services, Our Clients, Blogs, etc.
Have a clear vision of each component on these pages. Take help of a UI/UX or wireframing software to materialize the ideas more robustly and professionally. No matter which platform or method you use to build the site, this blueprint will prove to be very useful.
Fourth: Decide How To Build The Website
Now that you know how you want the site to look, choose the most suitable website building method from the following three options:
1. Using HTML
If you have prior experience or excellent knowledge in web development using HTML and CSS, this can be a viable option for you. However, you may need a sprinkle of JavaScript as well to make the site more dynamic and modern.
The best part about this is – coding the website yourself will provide you with all the freedom to get creative and make certain tweaks to the original blueprint for better user experience.
To begin creation of an HTML-based website, you will first need a text editor like Notepad++, TextMate, Atom or Sublime Text. Then start building each web page here beginning with the main homepage whose file name usually ends with “index.html.†Organizing each folder and adding a primary navigation bar are also essential parts of building the website.
2. Using WordPress
WordPress is probably the most popular platform right now for beginners to start a site. You can use any other CMS (Content Management System) instead, but we would recommend WordPress since it has the support of a vast community of experts.
Firstly, install WordPress – either manually or with the help of the one-click installers or with cPanel included in your hosting plan. Then go to its Dashboard and modify the site as per your requirements using site editors, themes, plugins, etc.
Install a theme template from the Appearance tab and then click on Activate to see how it looks. Add web pages or content by selecting Add New from Pages or Posts respectively.
Set the home page by navigating to Dashboard > Settings > Reading > Front Page Displays > A static page and then selecting the page you want. After making it publish-worthy, hit Publish on any post or page from the respective dashboard section.
3. Using Website Builders
This is the fastest and easiest way to build a website. Your hosting plan may include a website builder already, but if you can also choose a standalone website building platform if you want.
First, you create an account on such a platform (like Wix). Then choose the most suitable category for your website. Choose the Wix Editor or Wix ADI to customize the default templates. Find out a blank template for your site to go all in, or pick the best template for your website through filtering the given options by image, keyword, and type.
Introduce blog or multimedia contents here by clicking on Add button on the left menu and introduce features by selecting them from below the Apps button. Click on Publish to show your brand new site to the world.
Fifth: Index the New Website
Let Google know about your latest website by indexing it. Doing so for Google or any other search engine will bring up your site on the search results. By following some SEO techniques, you can even guarantee its presence on the very first page of the million results. See Google’s Webmaster Tools, especially the Search Console.
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