What does it take to build a website?
Building a website that brings you a stream of paying customers takes time, and you need to be patient.
Also, you would need to embrace being uncomfortable and learn alternative ways to run your business.
Sometimes, you may feel overwhelmed; however, you need to deal with your fear and overcome the challenges.
If you wish your website to be built with not much hassle, it is wise to go for a professional website designer.
You can reach out to expert designers through their social media handles, websites, or email.
If you cannot locate their email address, you may use an email search tool such as GetEmail.io to find that email.
Now, let me walk you through the website design checklist.
You may refer to this checklist regardless of whether you are creating the website or hiring a professional website developer to build one for you.
- Domain name registration
- Web Hosting
- Pick fonts and colors for your brand
- Logo creation
- Collect information to add to your website
- Create images and banners
- Plan your website’s layout and structure
- Choose a WordPress theme & install it
- Add plugins for additional functionality
- Add Google analytics
- Add Google search console
- Check if your website is well optimized for all devices
- Optimize your website for search engine
- Backup website
Let’s go deeper into a few of these items.
Domain name registration
Your domain name is the address of your website! It would be best if you had a domain name to direct people to your website.
It consists of two parts; the first part defines your brand name or what you do, and the second represents the organization type.
While choosing a domain, you must keep the long-term goal in your mind instead of your short-term plan.
Web hosting
Web hosting could be thought of as renting space for your website, and it is like renting an office space for your business.
Until you host your website, no one will be able to view it.
There are different types of web hosting such as cloud hosting, shared, virtual private server, dedicated hosting.
Though all these types of hosting act as a storage center, they all have different storage space, technical support, reliability, and server speed.
Pick fonts and colors for your brand.
Picking the font style and the colors play a huge role in the success of your website and business.
Your fonts should be visible not only on large screens but also on mobile devices. And the color you pick should resonate with your business type.
Following the same typography throughout your website will maintain uniformity.
Logo Creation
Now that you have selected the color and font for your brand, you could also use the same for your logo.
You could get it designed by a professional graphic designer.
Collect information to add to your website
With great content, you could tell your audience more about your business and how you could help them with your expertise.
You could do this by including the significant pages such as homepage, services, about us, contact, testimonial, FAQ, terms, and conditions.
Besides this, you can include a blog page to share the latest press release, news about your organization, etc.
Image and banners
Images can add a great touch to your website and differentiate whether your site looks professional or amateurish.
Bring out all your creative ideas and create banners that communicate your message.
Plan your website’s layout & structure
Before you begin creating your website, you need to have clarity of how it should look, the number of pages it should contain, and how you wish the navigation between the pages to happen.
This is where you almost plan everything on your website, for instance, the CTA, catchy headlines, etc.
Choose a WordPress theme & install it.
While selecting a theme, you should look out for excellent rating, tech support, mobile responsiveness, simplicity, compatibility with all the browsers.
Add plugins for additional functionality.
If you need extra functionality in your website, you can add plugins to fulfill the need.
And while installing a plugin, make sure that it is compatible with your theme version.
Add Google analytics and Google search console.
Google Analytics is a highly recommended tool for monitoring your website traffic, customer behavior, etc. This is a free tool and very easy to use.
With the Google search console, you can ensure that all your web pages are indexed and safeguard your site from any malicious attack.
Check if your site is well-optimized
You can use the inspect option to see how your site appears on different devices. Also, see if it opens in all the browsers.
Backup website
Sometimes things may go wrong with your website, and it may suddenly stop working or get hacked by someone.
So, it is always good to have a backup of your website.
Final Thoughts
This checklist will be your pathway to building a website. And when you are getting it done by an expert developer, you can use this list to coordinate with the developing team.