Creating a website is becoming easier than ever. Thankfully, gone are the days of having to struggle with code to build pages.
Yes, back in the day there were visual editors like FrontPage and also DreamWeaver to help you. However, they still often required some technical knowledge. And in particular, getting the pages you create from your computer to your website, was a mystery to most people.
And generally business owners don’t have the technical skills. Or even the interest in learning how to do all that. They are much too busy with sales, marketing, and dealing with clients.
Well, these days, the internet certainly isn’t only for the technically inclined any more. In fact, making a website is easier than ever. If you can point and click a mouse, that’s all you really need. So let’s go through a couple of options:
“Build-Your-Own” Website Services
All a website really is, is a collection of files on a computer. It’s images, it’s some text, perhaps some audio and video files. And those files reside on a computer called a web server.
What a web server does is hold onto those files until someone visits your site. The files are then presented to the person visiting. And that’s it.
So a website at the simplest level is files on a computer, that’s connected to the internet around the clock. But, there’s a lot of technical wizardry going on there. And if you really want to get into that you can (with a lot of studying).
But these days there’s services that hide all that from you. All you need to do is sign up to one of them, and then you can visually design your website.
It’s all taken care of “in the cloud”, so to speak. You design your site, you add your text, you upload images. You make sure everything looks as you want it to look. And, ta-da! You have a working website.
All the technical work behind the scenes is done for you. You just need to pay a monthly fee (often quite small). And your website stays up and running for your visitors.
There’s services like Wix and WordPress.com (not .org, more on that in a moment), and many others too. Of course this approach doesn’t give you the flexibility of managing all the technical aspects yourself. But it is the quickest and easiest, and often cheapest way, to get a good looking website online, in hours.
Of course having a website online is the first step of the process. If no one’s visiting it might as well not exist! So then start the job of promoting it. Getting website traffic through Google can be cost effective, and powerful. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). So consider SEO training so you can grow your website’s visibility, fast.
Using WordPress.org
Want to still keep things relatively straightforward, but give yourself more flexibility? Well, installing WordPress on your own website is an option. You may need some help with some initial aspects of the work. However, once it’s up and running, updating and managing your site is very easy.
WordPress.org is where you can download for free the same software that runs WordPress.com. It’s open source software, which means you can use it without paying.
You download it, configure it, upload it to your web server. And then design your site. And that’s pretty much it. This process is more complicated than the services detailed above, but can offer you a lot more flexibility and power.
