Date First Published: 9th January 2023
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: Web Development
Article Type: Computer Questions & Answers
Difficulty: EasyDifficulty Level: 3/10
Learn about how to make a website in this article. This is the 500th article.
Websites are an easy way of sharing your ideas, knowledge, thoughts, and services with people all around the world. Thinking about making a website can sound hard at first, especially if you have never made one before. This article will go through the stages of making a website and making it public.
Below are the stages of making a website.
Before you code your website from scratch or create any designs, you will need to know exactly what it will be about and what type of website it will be. You can write your plan on paper or in a word processor. Consider the following:
Website designs are not the final look and feel of your website. They are a blueprint, useful for thinking and communicating about the structure of the website that you are developing before any code is written. They are useful for understanding where the content, text, and images will be located on individual webpages. A website wireframe is most helpful for creating a design. You can manually draw the wireframe on a whiteboard or in graphics editing software, or use online tools, such as app.diagrams.net.
A sitemap can also be used to outline the design of your website. A sitemap is an illustration, showing a list of pages that a website will include. The homepage will always be at the top of the sitemap and below it will be the hierarchy of the website, which includes the directories and pages. It is not to be confused with an XML sitemap, which is what search engines use to find, crawl, and index website content. For more information on sitemaps, see this article.
Once you have finished writing plans and creating designs for your websites, it is then time to build your website. This is the main process of developing a website. You will need to decide which way you want to build your website. You can build your website using the following options:
If you are going to hand-code your website from scratch, you will need to use markup, stylesheet, and programming languages of the web to build it and have good knowledge of them. Although hand-coding a website from scratch takes much longer than using a CMS or a website building application, it will give you much more control over the design of your website as some website builders and content management systems come with limited design options. Markup, stylesheet, programming languages, and other technologies include:
It is not that difficult to build a website from scratch using a website building application, such as Adobe Dreamweaver. These often have WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interfaces, which means that when building and editing webpages in the application, you can see what the end result will look like inside the builder in exactly the same way as it would appear in a web browser. Website building applications simplify the process of building sites by allowing you to drag and drop images, text, buttons, and other elements onto webpages without having to manually code them. However, you still might need to do some coding and website building applications can create a lot of excessive code that leads to webpages being large in size.
A CMS is a web application that provides a graphical user interface for users to create, manage, edit, and publish web content without having to code it from scratch. Instead of you building your own system for creating webpages and storing images and other content, the CMS will take care of that for you. With a CMS, you will be able to write your content in an interface that looks similar to Microsoft Word.
WordPress is a good example of a major CMS. It helps you to create webpages and blog posts quickly, manage user comments, and has thousands of different themes and plugins that you can choose from and use free of charge. Drupal, Joomla, and Wix are other CMS options. A CMS makes it very easy for anyone without web development experience to create a website from scratch. However, in terms of design, if you used a CMS, it may lead to limited flexibility. For example, Wix does not allow users to directly edit the HTML code of the website itself or move it to another hosting provider because it is closed source. Also, not all themes and templates are available free of charge and they may come with hidden costs in the implementation.
This is the fourth and final option for building a website. If you are not willing to develop your website by yourself and do not want to deal with any development aspects (especially for advanced sites), hiring a professional may be the best option for you if you can afford it. Before you hire a professional, always check to see a portfolio of their work and whether they can do the job for you.
Once you have finished coding all of your webpages and have made a clear hierarchy, you are ready to test your website. Before you publish it, it is always recommended to inspect it to ensure that it works properly, it has no broken links, errors in the HTML markup, design flaws, missing tags, spelling errors, and other mistakes. You can test for usability, accessibility, functionality, responsiveness, compatibility, consistency and more. Even a small mistake within a website can make it look unprofessional, which may have a negative impact on the traffic that your website receives.
This is the fifth and final step of making a website. Once you have finished coding all of your webpages, have made a clear hierarchy, have tested your website, and are happy with it, you are ready to publish it. You will need the following to publish your website:
After your website is up and running, it will require maintenance. Designing, developing, and publishing a website is not a single activity and will require monitoring. You should consider the following things below after your website has gone live/
When a website is first published, it always starts with 0 backlinks and 0 indexed pages in the search results. Link building and indexing can take a long time. As you are updating your website, always ensure that each page is optimised for search engines and that your pages will be crawlable and indexable. You should also carry out keyword research to determine how many people are searching for keywords relevant to your website, and how difficult it is to rank for them. For more information about SEO, see this article.
Competition is an important thing to consider after making a website. Since anyone can start a website, they face a lot of competition, particularly in search engines, making it harder for new sites to rank high enough for people to see the result and click through. For example, if you created a website for recipes on how to cook meals, there will be lots and lots of other sites also competing for the same keywords in search engines. Some of the sites will likely be difficult to compete with as they are very high-authority, have been around for decades, and have gained thousands and thousands of backlinks over the decades. Determining which keywords their competitors are ranking for and how a website performs compared its competitors is a key part of keyword research.
Websites will require maintenance and attention after they have gone live, particularly ecommerce websites that allow people to buy products. Make sure to answer any questions that people have when contacting you using your contact form or email address. A system that allows users to quickly answer questions and deal with complaints is essential when selling products online. For your safety, you should be careful about what type of information you have available on your website. You should never add things like your home address as this type of information can be misused to steal your identity. Instead, you should set up a contact page that contains a contact form for people to contact you.
Also, make sure to add fresh content on a regular basis. Search engines are more likely to crawl and index your site when you are active on it than when you don't publish anything for a few weeks. The more that you write, the higher the chances of someone finding and following your website. Websites that have not published any new content for a long time are often considered abandoned and no longer maintained, leading to a decline in visitors.
Once your site is live and you want people to visit it, they will need to be able to easily find it. If no one can find your site, then you won't have anyone to look at your content or make purchases and no one will know that it exists. Tips for making your site easily discoverable include:
Making a website takes a lot of time and hard work. Fortunately, it is possible to make money from it, even if you don't directly sell a product or service on there. You can monetise your website with ads, affiliate marketing, and donations. In order to generate any kind of revenue, you must have people clicking through your ads and affiliate links. You will need a decent amount of people on your site to do this.
With advertising, advertisers place ads on your websites and you will earn money each time someone clicks through an ad and every 1000 impressions (RPM). Affiliate marketing is when you advertise someone else's product on your website. If someone clicks through the link and makes a purchase, you will earn a small commission from whoever sells that product. You can monetise your site using services like Google AdSense and Amazon Associates.
If you have a website that is difficult to make money from, you can consider accepting donations from other people. People that want to support your site will make donations, sometimes regular payments. Often, donations are made through PayPal.
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