That is just the wrong way of thinking in the digital era and there is no reason to be afraid of internet when today starting a website is easier than ever. Give or take a few fine tunes, it all comes down to three basic steps.
1. Domain name and hosting
Firstly you will have to choose a name for your web domain and a hosting plan to go with it. Picking a name and matching it with an appropriate TLD can be quite a hustle. If you want to go with a .com domain and if your company has less than 5 words in its name, it’s highly likely that your desired name is not available as we are out of four letter .com domains. In that case, it might be best to take a look at some gTLD or ccTLD alternatives such as domain.me.
Buying a domain and hosting plan usually go hand in hand, as you can’t use one without the other. There are numerous different hosting plans and the difference usually lies in the amount of traffic you can withhold, as well as the amount of data you can upload and host on your website. There are other factors counted in as well, but these are only important if you look beyond basic website needs, which are not being investigated in this article.
2. Building Your Website
If you plan on doing all of the work on your own and you lack advanced coding skills, it is best to go with one of the many available content management systems (CMS). Even if you are not too tech savy, you have probably heard of WordPress. It is a No.1 open source cms and by far, the most user friendly one. WordPress is famous for its one-click installation and a high number of premade themes, plugins and widgets that cover a variety of different functions which cater to everyone's needs.
We don’t want to skip Joomla! or Drupal, but these are somewhat more advanced CMSs than WordPress (especially Drupal) and are mostly used for more advanced projects and larger ecommerce websites, as WordPress can host small scale e-commerce solutions.
There is always an option of getting your website done without the use of CMS - via HTML and CSS. However, to go down this road you either need to hit the books (if you lack the knowledge) or turn to a professional.
3. Getting your name out in the open
Whichever method you opt for, this next step is all about getting your name heard. This is the reason why we are going online in the first place.
There are a few ways of going about online marketing, but three basic ones are:
● SEO
● paid ads
● and social media marketing
Presuming you are on a budget, you don’t have to execute all of these strategies at once, each one has its advantages and disadvantages. It might be best to go with search engine optimisation (SEO) for starters, as it is a technique that improves the rankings of your pages on the search engines. If there is success with SEO you can easily later implement the other two. On the other hand, if your budget allows you to, you can freely invest in all three at once which will certainly bring in best results.
