Using Social Platforms for your business? Did you imagine what happens when Instagram changes its algorithm? Or when Facebook stops showing your posts to your most prospective customers and social fans? The outcome can be catastrophic for your business if you don’t have another way to reach your audience.
Your website is an online space where people find you and it allows you to reach a global audience, regardless of where you live or operate your business. Having your own business gives you complete ownership over it, allowing your business to showcase all the brand elements the way you want. You will have complete control of what it looks like and how it functions, without having to worry about losing contact with your customers and fans.
If you want to strengthen your online presence, we recommend you hire a professional web designer, but if you don’t have enough budget, you can design your website in a few simple steps.
But, not sure how to design a website without the help of experts?
Thanks to the technological advancement and evolution of CMS like WordPress, website builders, now you can easily design a website and craft an impressive online presence of your own without any prior coding knowledge.
This article will walk you through how to design a website and help you with everything you need to know right from choosing your website builder and domain name to understanding how to design each element of your site.
How to Design a Website Using WordPress in 8 Easy Steps?
- Step 1: Select the right tool to create a website
- Step 2: Plan your website layout
- Step 3: Choose a suitable domain name and reliable web hosting
- Step 4: Get started with WordPress
- Step 5: Select a theme and design your website
- Step 6: Prepare high-quality website content
- Step 7: Optimize your website for SEO best practices
- Step 8: Test your website regularly
Step 1: Select the right tool to create a website
To select the right software, first, you need to figure out what type of website you want to make. After that, you will choose the best-fit platform for setting up your website.
- If you are planning to start a blogging website, then we recommend building a website with WordPress.
- If you need a very simple static website, such as for business portfolios, small business, product brochure sites, etc. with a few pages where you will add content to showcase your company, then you might want to use any sophisticated and popular website builder of your choice.
- If you are planning to start an eCommerce store, then you should go for WooCommerce.
Step 2: Plan your website layout
Once you determine what type of website you want to make and log into the platform of your choice, now it’s time to conceptualize your website layout. Or you can use a pre-designed layout created by a professional designer. At this stage, our main purpose is to determine the basic structure of your website.
Proper planning will give you a better understanding of:
- How many numbers of website pages.
- What are all essential pages for your website?
- What content do you need to prepare for the website?
- What additional assets or features do you need to implement?
- Which is the best suitable software or tool for your project?
For a business website, planning involves many different steps, such as creating user personas, doing competitive research, preparing a brand book, creating effective content and design plans, coming up with the right SEO strategies, and more. But if you are making a website for personal use, you don’t need to be so complicated.
Step 3: Choose a suitable domain name and reliable web hosting
For a professional website, you need to own a relative domain name that represents your brand appropriately. And a reliable hosting service helps you make sure that your website won’t go down and that it loads quickly.
Suggesting for Choosing Domain Name
- If you’re designing a website for your business, your domain name should match your company name. For example, your domain name could be “YourCompanyName.com”
- If you’re designing a website for personal use then YourName.com can be a great option.
- Make sure your domain name should be short, punchy, and clear.
- Avoid using the number string in your domain name.
- Try to pick a unique domain name that reflects your brand identity.
Suggestions For Choosing a Web hosting service
Hosting plays a major part in the process of launching a good website responsible for assuring its availability online.
Picking the wrong web hosting services or an unsuitable hosting plan can seriously downgrade your website’s performance and functionality.
When it comes to reliability, some of the most popular hosting companies we recommend are Bluehost, Godaddy, and Hostgator.
When choosing a hosting company, consider the following factors
- Your business needs
- Their uptime scores/server reliability
- How flexible are their plans
- The signup and renewal pricing
- Their refund policy/free trials
- What features they offer
- Backups for your website
- Quality of their customer support
- Server speed and responsiveness
Step 4: Get started with WordPress
There are various popular easy to use platforms such as Joomla, Wix, or Squarespace people use to design a website but the most popular one is WordPress. There are currently over 75 million active sites over the internet using WordPress.
As you can see, nearly half of the websites on the Internet are running on the WordPress platform.
Why People Prefer WordPress For Designing a Website?
WordPress tops the list of most often used site-building tools worldwide. Let’s see the reason behind its popularity.
- Highly Flexible and Adaptable for Changing Needs
- Offer Multiple Attractive Theme Options
- Offer Great Plugins to Extend Functionality
- Create Mobile Responsive Sites
- Offer Built-In Blog Feature
- Offers Support by WordPress Community
- Highly Customizable and user friendly
Considering the popularity of WordPress almost all well-established and reliable web hosting companies provide one-click WordPress installation.
Here we are going to learn how to install WordPress on Bluehost.
Steps required to install WordPress on Bluehost ( the process is very similar for other popular hosting companies)
- Go to Bluehost.com and click on the “Get Started Now” button.
- Choose your hosting plan, you can start with the basic plan then upgrade in the future as per requirement.
- If you already have a domain, input the domain name into the “new domain” box, after which, BlueHost will check its availability. If it is not available, it will show the list of alternative domain names that you can choose from instead.
- Now register Bluehost, fill in your information and choose your hosting package and remove unnecessary extras.
- Make the payment, go through the payment process then you will set up your Bluehost account
- Log in to Bluehost use “one-click WordPress install” to Install WordPress.
Let’s create a website…
Now create a website by Bluehost’s 4-step process
- Step 1. You will start the process by answering 3 questions as shown in the image:
- What kind of site?
- What type is it?
- And who is it for?
You can select from the available choices or pick what fits your case. Then click on continue.
- Step 2. With this step, you have to answer what would you like to add to your site? By selecting from available options. There are five choices you have to choose from: Blog, Store, About Me, Resume, and Custom logo.
- Step 3. In this step, you need to answer a few more questions such as
- What do you want to name your site?
- What’s your website tagline?
- Are you comfortable with creating websites?
Now click on “Continue to theme selection”.
- Step 4. Picking a theme: Here you can select pre-designed free/ premium templates to build your website. You can even change it anytime and use another one.
Once you are done with this 4 step website setup, you will be taken back to your Bluehost account page.
Congratulations! You have installed WordPress successfully.
Just for confirmation, enter your domain into your web browser and you will get a “Coming soon” page.
Now, it’s time to launch your website
Inside your Bluehost account, you will see the “Launch My Site” button on the top right of the screen as shown below.
After clicking on the “Launch My Site” button, your website will go live!
Now if you type your website URL inside a web browser, you will find a website with a default WordPress theme.
Here it’s your turn to change the website content accordingly and you can change the theme as well.
Bluehost account gives you direct access to your WordPress dashboard from your Bluehost account by clicking the blue “WordPress” button right to the “Launch my site” button in the top right corner of your screen.
Step 5: Select a theme and design your website
Your Web design is of extreme importance because it impacts how your audience perceives your brand. Your website’s first impression makes them either get them to stay on your site and learn about your business or leave your site and move to a competitor. A good web design keeps a visitor hooked to your site.
For a clean web design:
- Use a clean, organized web design.
- Ensure that your web design is mobile responsive.
- Make sure that your web design meets niche needs.
- Use clear and easy navigation.
Select the right theme
Your website theme should reflect your brand persona.
For accessing WordPress themes you can simply log in to WordPress, go to Appearance > Themes, and click the large + sign that says Add New Theme.
Focus on web designing features such as:
- Make sure to have clear navigation
- Make sure to have a contact form
- Enabled comments selection
- Make sure to have a search bar
- Integrate social media
- Choose appropriate font and colors
- Check E-commerce support
Step 6: Prepare high-quality website content
Google ranks sites having quality and unique content, higher. If you want to communicate a clear message to your visitors, it’s essential to have quality content.
While preparing website content, there are some of the most common pages people have on their websites that play a vital role in setting your brand image.
About us page
If a visitor wants to know about your company’s business, they will head straight to the ‘About Us’ page on your site. That’s why it is important to create it wisely and put all of your essential information to attract more audiences. The ‘About Us’ page introduces your company to new visitors — the quality content here can help you to build viable relationships and instill trust in your audience.
Contact us page
Your website ‘Contact Us’ page plays an important role in turning your website visitors into your customers by providing them with a place where they can find all your contact details easily. Other than the contact form, your contact page must have the following information.
- The name of the contact person with his/her designation.
- Company’s name.
- Email address.
- Complete address of your company (if you have a physical location).
- Your company’s legal information.
- Working days and hours for your company.
Product/ Service page
Product and service pages are mainly used to list and describe the products or services you offer– consider it an online catalog for your business. To ensure that the page content is effective and of high quality, you will need to:
- Post-high-quality product pictures.
- Short and crisp product description (depends on product)
- Share a detailed description of your product, one that covers all of the critical aspects, in the description box.
- Clear highlights about various payment options that your website supports.
Blog pages
Brands are utilizing blog pages for effective content marketing. Not only deriving lots of traffic to the website but also boosting organic ranking.
Step 7: Optimize your website for SEO best practices
SEO is a cost-effective way to higher your website rank on SERP, your site will generate more organic traffic. SEO also improves the user experience on your site.
Practice to improve website SEO
- Utilize dTitle Tag and Meta Description effectively
- Optimize website Images
- Optimize Page Load Speed
- Use Internal Linking properly
- Simplify website navigation
- Target Keywords in Your URL
- Try to gain quality backlinks
- Publish high-quality fresh Content
Step 8: Test your website regularly
Once you are done setting up a website, your work doesn’t stop there. You will have to work hard for further improvement.
After launching your site, you need to have a firm strategy in place regarding the next steps for your website’s growth and maintenance.
You need to conduct AB testing on different versions of the website and optimize its performance regularly, and accordingly, apply changes.
Conclusion:
Hope this step-by-step guide on how to design a website helps you with all the essential information while designing a website. Creating a website is not enough so please don’t stop here. Always try to upgrade your skills and implement more complex functionalities and features. This way, you won’t just learn how to design your website but exactly the site that your business needs.
So keep on learning and do your best, and keep looking for ways to improve your site to make it the perfect extension of your business. And if you ever need assistance, our support team is experienced and is just a click away. Get the most out of your online experience and learning, build something you can be proud of. All the best!