It’s outrageous how many different ways there are to build a website. If you need a website, but don’t have the budget to hire a web developer, and you don’t have any experience building a website, then it’s easy to get sucked into bad choices. This guide will give you a broad overview of how to set up a website so that you can sustain it and improve it over time. It will help you set realistic expectations for the kind of sacrifices that you will need to make and the level of talent that you will need to have to build and maintain a website. And it will help you avoid the pitfalls that would likely cause you to give up and hire a developer or abandon your site completely.
Assumptions
This post is for raw beginners. There are no assumptions of knowledge for this post. But that isn’t meant to imply that this post will tell you absolutely everything that you need to know about building a website. I have provided links when it is intuitive, but you will also need to learn things on your own. It’s okay if you don’t understand everything that I reference. If I reference a piece of tech or a concept that you have never heard of, then you don’t need to immediately look it up. You will learn about things later as go through the process of building your site.
Building a GOOD website isn’t easy. If you have it in your head that a website doesn’t have to be much more than a glorified business card, then my advice is that you probably shouldn’t bother building a website at all and stick with promoting yourself or your business through social media, or you should hire a pro to help you build your site. It’s better to have no website than it is to have a bad website. However, if you can accept that reading this post is just the tip of the iceberg for what you need to learn to build your website, then you are ready to begin your training.
How to Read this Post
This post is a pretty fast read, but it contains a fair amount of links, and the links will lead to more links. I would make sure to read this whole post at least once before you click on any of the links or make any decisions. You can bookmark this article, and use it as a primer for when you need to start working again.
Once you’re done reading this post, you will probably realize that you are going to need to set aside time to do even more research before you begin making any purchases or setting anything up. Oftentimes people will put off building a website then panic or get impatient and make a bunch of bad decisions when setting it up. Research and design are huge components of building a website, and you should consider those activities as serious and important work. Remember the carpenter’s expression, “measure twice and cut once.”
Step 1: Set a Budget for Building a Website
There’s no such thing as a good free website. You can build a website without paying much money, but if you do then you’re going to need to put a lot of your time into building it. You can usually set up a decent quality website for a few hundred bucks, and then you can probably get away without paying for anything else for several years. However, you should realize that running a website by yourself usually gets more expensive over time. And the expenses tend to grow in proportion to your original expenditures. So it’s a good idea to start out as cheap as feasible. But the financial cost isn’t the real cost.
If you want to build a good website without a developer, then you need to be willing to devote a significant amount of time to it. You need to treat it like a part time job. It has to be something that you are willing to work on every week indefinitely. Don’t make the assumption that building a website is something that you can bang out over a few weekends or a vacation and then forget about it. If you take that attitude, then your site probably won’t be very good (or at least nobody but you will be convinced that it’s good). If you’re too busy to devote at least four hours a week to building your site, then you might want to give serious consideration to paying someone to help you.
Consider hiring a pro. Even if you don’t hire a pro, you should consider the dichotomy between doing it yourself, and having someone do it for you. Consider how much a pro will charge you, and consider how much of your own time that you will have to give even though you are working with a pro. You don’t need to contact a pro to do this. You should do your own research on the internet. If you do contact a pro, then you should have a budget, and you should have a list of expectations. Otherwise, you may find yourself being taken advantage of. You can keep reading this post and this blog to begin getting an idea of what those expectations ought to be.
Step 2: Get a Webhost for Building a Website
Before you start building your site, your site is going to need to exist somewhere. You need a physical server so people can actually look up your site and view it. You’ll also want to buy a domain. Most webhosts will do this cheap, but there are other companies that specialize in registering domains that will do it even cheaper. If you are a raw beginner, HostGator isn’t a bad choice. It isn’t perfect, but if you are willing to take the time to set it up properly, you can get your site loading reasonably fast onto browsers at a relatively inexpensive price, and you get unlimited memory.
Do your research. Don’t choose the first webhost that is recommended to you. Take the time to consider other webhosts too. There are a lot of things to consider when picking a webhost, and most of them are pretty intuitive. However, the consideration that most people struggle with is caching. This is a complex subject that is usually hard for raw beginners to understand, and the result is raw beginners tend to choose a webhost with no idea about how their caching services work.
You should take the time to learn how caching works by reading this post before you decide which webhost is best for you. If you don’t then you will probably either end up paying for services that you could set up yourself for free, or you may end up with a slow website because you don’t know how to set up your caching services.
Another important consideration to make that raw beginners often overlook is the geographic location of your server. It is impossible to serve the entire world equally unless you have a substantial budget. You will need to decide which geographic region ought to get the best service. Once you have read about caching, the reason for why you need to make this sacrifice ought to become more clear to you.
Step 3: Select a CMS for Building a Website
If you are not a developer, and you want to build your own website, then a content management service is mandatory. Don’t worry right now if you don’t understand what a CMS is. You can research that later.
I highly recommend that you choose WordPress as your CMS. It will provide you with everything you need (and a whole lot that you don’t need) to build a sophisticated website. You can add WordPress to your webhost even if your webhost doesn’t provide a service for you, but most likely, your webhost will. There are other options for content management, but they tend to be either less accessible, less powerful, and/or produce results that are too generic and not very appealing.
Once you have your foundational WordPress website set up, you will need a WordPress theme. Nothing you do will have a higher impact on how your WordPress site looks and functions than your WordPress theme. If you like this blog, then using one of the Big Themes is the right choice for your first WordPress theme. The Big Themes have tons of documentation (including on this blog) and are updated on a regular basis.
After your theme is loaded, you will have a lot of options at your disposal. It can be overwhelming trying to figure out where to start. You may be tempted to try to add even more WordPress options. But you should be wary of trying too many things. You don’t want to get stuck in the startup stage of building your website because of paralysis by analysis. Stick with learning foundational tools, then consider whether or not you need more features in the future.
You should try experimenting with the controls in the block editor and the controls in the customizer. Don’t let yourself get frustrated if you are a little confused by them at first. The more you use them, the more intuitive they become. Try building a one page site, and experiment with block patterns. You don’t have to be a developer to do this, but you do have to be comfortable with learning tech, and you have to be willing to work.
Step 4: Keep Learning
Don’t expect to get your website to be exactly right the first time you set it up. Websites are dynamic. They are designed with the expectation that they will be updated. Most great DIY websites didn’t start out that way. It’s okay if you think that your website kind of sucks in the beginning. You can make it great as long as you’re patient and you’re willing to try to improve one little piece at a time. If you keep some time set aside in every week, then you can eventually make your website awesome.
Questions?
Learning this stuff can be a bit like drinking from a fire house, so if you have a question, then please post it in the comments section.