So you want to build a website but you don’t know where to start? Surprisingly building a website is a fairly straight forward process and while you’re going to need to know a few things to get started, creating the actual website is a piece of cake.

The Domain Name

photo credit: Tim Dorr

Your domain name is your branding on the web. Domain names are an important part of your online identity and should be choosen carefully. Apple Computers for example uses the domain name apple.com while Microsoft uses microsoft.com, a domain name should be easy to remember for your clients, ideally end with .com (you can also own .net, .org etc) and be related to your business.

Hosting

Once you have a domain name, building a website is easy except just like running a restaurant you’ll need to put it somewhere. Small businesses don’t really need to be all that concerned with hosting, a simple web hosting package will meet the needs of most businesses, which is why I recommend BlueHost. Web hosting is like renting space on the internet, it’s about making sure your website is always online.

Build a Website

Now that you have a domain name and hosting, you need to look at building a website for yourself. Throughout my website you fill find everything you need to build a website so I don’t want to repeat myself too much but needless to say, the most important part of building a small business website is content. That’s why when I build websites for customers I stress that before we push a single pixel around the screen, we have:

1. An approved Sitemap (a list of all the pages on the website)
2. A summary of the text, photos and graphics for each page

Sounds funny but in grade school these days, kids are trained how to build websites better than most professional web designers. Before kids can write a story, they first have to create a Story Web. This is a basic structure of a story which shows the key elements of a story. To the right, I’ve created what might be the lamest story web in history … but it’s still better than what a lot of business owners created for their website.

So, here’s the secret to building a website:

1. Write down ten objectives, if you can’t think of ten … try harder
2. Throw out five objectives, ten is too many
3. Pick your main objective … that’s your homepage
4. For each objective, add three points that makes your website special
5. Turn each point into a paragraph

Congratulations, you’ve just built a Story Web (or sitemap) for your website. 

Now, give me a call if you’d like me to build a website for you, or take a look at these great articles to build one yourself:

1. How to make a website for free
2. Does your website help, or hurt your business?
3. Get a Free Web Site