There are so many great reasons to start a website, but there are some things you need to consider before you start. With literally millions of websites occupying the internet the competition is pretty tough, but if you can create something unique and follow some basic rules then you’re going to get people visiting your site.
Before you embark on your website journey, it’s important to have a plan of action that you can follow. It’s easy to go about things in a haphazard way and end up not knowing whether you’re coming or going. However, if you take a methodical approach when creating your website then you give yourself a good chance of success.
1. What Are Your Goals?
People start websites for all kinds of different reasons, sowhat are yours? What do you want to achieve with this venture? Are you looking to sell a productor a service, are you looking to build a community, to practice your writing, or are you simply doing it for yourself?
How you answer this question is going to change some of the decisions that you make regarding your website, but for the most part, the basics will stay the same. At the end of the day, you want to produce something you are proud of and that people enjoy reading.
2. Choose a Niche
If your goal is to get people to your website, then you’re going to want to choose a niche. It’s extremely hard to create an effective website that covers a broad range of subjects. Search engines reward “experts” and being an expertin one subject is difficult enough, let alone being an expert in lots of different niches.
Selecting a niche will help you to focus on creating the best quality content you can and establish yourself as a trustworthy source in the eyes of Google and co.
3. Sort Out Your Domain and Hosting
Before you can start doing any designing or writing you’ve got to sort out the technical side of things. First off, you need a domain name, which is the address where your visitors can find you. These are generally easy to find and inexpensive, but you will want to pick a domain name that’s memorable.
Once you’ve got your domain you can look at hosting with a platform like Onyx.io. This will help you get to the point where you can start to customize and begin building out your website.
4. Create Great Content
If you want your website to start showing up in the search engines, then you’re going to have to be committed to regularly putting out great content. There’s a lot of competition out there, so you will have to be patient and keep working hard, but generally, high-quality content shines through.
Make sure you’re getting the basics of SEO (search engine optimization) right, but remember that you’ve got to cater first and foremost for the humans that read your content rather than the bots.
Remember why you started a website in the first place and keep putting your personality into your content.
