17 min read

Are you going to start your own business? It’s great. Nothing like doing your own business but sometimes you have to go out of budget. Especially making a website is very time-consuming and costly. Website is essential for the long-term growth of any business and you must not ignore it because of your online presence, brand images, and customer relationship building, everything depends on your site. Now the question is “How to get your own website?”.

Well, there are many options you can choose to build your website, for example, you can approach a company providing website development services, you can hire an employee to do it, or you can outsource your website to a freelancer. You can choose any option which you think will work for you. Honestly speaking! site development services are overrated. You have to spend a good amount of money to build your website from someone else.

What if you build your site? I know it sounds weird when you don’t have a developer’s background. Believe me, it doesn’t matter whether you have a developer’s background or not, you can still make your site. Only you need is the right knowledge about website-building tools and some guidance. In this article, you will get all the required knowledge and guidance to make your business website and save your money. WordPress is an open-source and free-to-use website building tool, you can use it to create your website online without any money spent.

Read this article till the end to get the information you require to build your website.

Purpose of Building Website

Before getting your hands on building your website, you should be very clear about your purpose of making this website, such as what is your business scope, your audience, and your product/services. It is important to be clear about what kind of site you want right now. So, the purpose of building your website should be very clear in your mind.

• Do you want to sell a product?
• Do you want to share your thoughts on the blog?
• Do you want to promote your new business?
• An e-commerce website?

Knowing answers to these questions would help you to be sure from the beginning about what are your expectations from the site, and work accordingly to fulfill that expectations. Defining the purpose of your site your help you to get an idea of what kind of functionalities you need on your site. Write down everything that you want on the website such as design, theme, functions, pages, etc.

Make sure to define the scope of your site such as:

• Site Traffic
• Followers on Social Media Platforms
• Site Revenue
• Customers in Your Physical Store
• Number of Business Leads or Contacts from Site

Once the purpose, design, functions, and scope of your site are decided, the next step is to outline the website content. In the outline of the content you will add:

• Website Menu Content
• Describe Product and Services
• About Us Content
• Home Page Content
• Buttons and CTA

Get Domain Name

Once all of the requirements of your site are well-defined. Here the real work begins. You have to choose a domain name for your website along with a web hosting plan for website performance management. Be very careful while choosing a domain name for your website because your brand identity and online presence very much depend on it. You have to get your domain name and web hosting plan before creating a site.

Many online companies are providing domain services to customers at cheap rates, you can access them to register your domain. Two parts of your domain are the top-level domain and the second-level domain.

Top-level domain (TLD) —In Temok.com, the “.com” is the TLD of your domain. There are many TLDs such as .com, .net, and .info .org. You can even select something unique, like some TLDs: .site, .party,  .limo, .pizza, .store, etc. I would recommend you choose .com because it is most commonly recognized by the customers’ other TLDs are not so common to use.

A second-level domain (SLD) — In Temok.com, “Temok” is the keyword that serves as your website’s address. It should be very descriptive, specific, memorable, and relevant so that customers can remember and find it easily.

Brainstorm to get some ideas about your website’s domain and search for the relevant domain online. If you don’t find the exact domain, you can also use synonyms or spill the words a bit to find the right thing for you.

NOTE: I would recommend you keep your domain name small and avoid using numbers or hyphens if not necessary.

Choose Your Web Hosting Plan

If the domain is the address of your website, hosting is like a physical space where the website lives. The hosting plan of your site has a huge impact on your site performance such as the loading speed of your site and the maintenance it requires.

There are many web hosting companies offering a lot of options to fulfill web hosting needs. If you are a beginner to web hosting then it is recommended to go for shared hosting. It is fast, affordable, and fulfills your requirements for a basic website. In starting you can get a basic web hosting plan and later you can upgrade it as your website grows.

Choose a Platform

Here comes the most important step because the platform that you will choose to make your website would either your tasks super easy or hell difficult for you. WordPress, Wix, Joomla, and Drupal are some of the major website builders.

WordPress is the best fit for beginners because it is very easy to use and free of cost. It is a user-friendly platform and you need no development experience to work on it. It is a reliable CMS to work on and almost 75 million websites on the internet are using it. With a basic understanding of WordPress tools, you can build your website in a matter of hours.

You can get your WordPress hosting services from any trustworthy hosting service provider in the market. First, you have to do WordPress installation using cPanel and then you can do configuration settings. The WordPress themes are very simple to use and it will save a lot of time and effort. For small business websites, it is the best option to choose.

Why Choose WordPress?

Here are some of the major reasons why you should choose WordPress over other options.

• Most website-building tools available are too expensive and you must have a high budget for building websites on them. These options are also very limited in the market. WordPress is cost-effective and provides a lot of functionalities to the user.
• WordPress is a more user-friendly CMS as compared with Joomla and Drupal.
• WordPress is also very easy to learn compared with other web development languages such as PHP, HTML, CSS, etc.

Choose and Install a Theme

After installing WordPress to your domain name, you can see a very basic site. Now you have to select a theme and design to make your website more unique and different from other websites. For this purpose, you have to select a theme for your website based on what is your website’s purpose.  

For installing the theme on your site, go to your WordPress dashboard. You can see numerous buttons, functions, and options, which seem a bit complicated, but it isn’t.

Here I am going to guide you about choosing and installing the theme of your website in WordPress. Once you understand the WordPress dashboard, it will be far easier for you to use the different functions and tools available to create your website. Following are some of the major elements of WordPress themes:

• The Complete Design or Style of Your Site
• Color Themes
• Page Layouts (Or Templates)
• Additional Stylistic Details
• In Most Cases – Responsive Design
• Font Design
• Widget Locations
• Styles for Blog Posts and Blog Archives
• Menu Styles / Structure

There are thousands of free themes available on WordPress that you can use in the “Appearance” section on the dashboard’s left side. Click on the “Appearance” section and go to “Themes”. Here you will enter the themes page of your WordPress; you can select any theme for your website from here. When you click on the “Add New” it will take you to all the free themes of WordPress.

You Can Choose A Template Based on Your Site Type

From here you can use some really handy filters to search themes, for example, “Most popular” themes include the most downloaded themes, “Featured” are themes chosen by WordPress, and “Latest Theme” are just released themes on the platform.

Selecting the “Feature Filter” would help you to find the best theme by providing more options. For a more professional website, more robust and more design-led than premium themes would be more suitable. If you want to make your website more professional, you must choose from Premium themes because they have more reliable code and higher support, in case something goes wrong. Similarly, they just look and function better than the free themes you can pick up on the WordPress Theme Directory.

Some premium themes are like web design software, where you can build and design your layouts of pages and themes. The premium themes offer you more flexibility to build the kind of website you need. I would recommend you to go to “Theme Forest” to buy a premium for the site.

Once you have selected the theme you want for your website, the next step is the installation of the theme. For this, you just have to click on the “Install” option and then click “Activate”. The selected theme will be installed in your WordPress and implemented to your website content, you can change this theme anytime you want and it will not have any effect on the content (pages, blog posts, images). Rest assured they are secure and won’t be deleted.

Create Pages on the Website

WordPress is the most flexible and user-friendly website-building platform. Creating a page in WordPress is also an easy task and anyone can do it easily. For example, if you want to create an “About Us” page. Here are some steps you have to follow to make an “About Us” page for your website. The “About Us” page is the first-page people usually make while building a website. This page is also shown in the navigation bar at the top of the page.

Following are some steps that you have to follow for creating a page on your website.

1. In the Dashboard, the sidebar selects the “Pages” section and goes down to the “Add New” option.
2. You will land on a page that looks like Microsoft Word. Its functions are also very similar. On this page, you can add images, text, shortcodes, video, and loads more to your website page content.
3. After adding the content to your page, you can click “Save Draft” on the right menu and click “Preview” to view what you have made before publishing it on the “Live Site”

Adding Pages to Menu

Following are the 3 steps that you have to follow to show your newly created page on the navigation bar.

1. Save the draft of your new page. To ensure none of the content is losing that you’ve created on the page, click on the “Update” button.
2. In the sidebar of the Dashboard Click on the “Appearance” section and then “Menus”
3. On the left of the center, you can see your newly created page in the “Pages” box. Tick on the pages box, you want to add to your menu (navigation bar), then click on “Add to Menu”. In the section “Menu Structure”, you can shift the order of the pages around by just dragging and clicking into position.

Creating Blog Post Pages

To publish content through your blog, you have to go to the “Posts” section. Clicking on the “posts” and then clicking on the add new button will take you to the blog publishing and editing interface that you can use to manage your blog.

within WordPress, you can easily classify the content with posts, and it would be easier for visitors to find your blog posts, particularly the older content. To add a blog to your website, you can use posts and categories. For example, you want to make a category “blog”. For this, simply add it to the menu and start creating posts.

To create a blog post, you have to follow the following steps:

1. To create a new category on your blog, you have to go to “Posts -> Categories”
2. Or the other way to do this is, you go to “Posts -> Add New”. Then with a completed blog post, you can allocate it to the suitable category and you can publish it.

So, you have created a category for a specific blog post. You can also add it to the menu so your visitors can easily access it.

Installing Plugins

Plugins are extensions or modules that you can install on WordPress to raise your website’s capabilities. There are a lot of WordPress plugins you can use to easily build your website. They add additional usability, features, and tools to your website that usually are not included in your WordPress Theme. For plugin installation, head over to the section “Plugin” in the WordPress Dashboard and then click on “Add New”. To find the plugins, you can use the search function.

There are more than 30,000 WordPress plugins that you can install based on your needs.  Before choosing any plugin for your website make sure its reviews are good and existing customers are satisfied with it. There are a lot of options for plugins but not all of them are good. Similarly, check if the Plugin is being updated regularly.

The overall installations of the plugin are very simple, just one click and you are done.

Using the Plugins, you can change your basic website into an e-commerce shop in a few minutes. You can also use them to improve your overall SEO of the website, add a forum, photo gallery, and many more!

Following are some of the most famous and widely used plugins of WordPress that are reliable and you can also use them on your website.

1. Site Kit by Google – lets you access data from Google Analytics, Google AdSense, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights from the admin panel of WordPress.
2. Yoast SEO – if you want to make sure that your site is up for success by improving its organic traffic then Yoast SEO is a must-have plugin for you. It makes it easy to format what text and images are used when you share web pages on social media.
3. Contact Form 7 – it is the oldest and a popular WordPress contact form plugin available. You can use this plugin to manage and create numerous contact forms and effortlessly customize form fields.

Your website is almost done and running with the domain, hosting, plugins, and theme. Now, you have to insert content to your website. In this article, I will cover the basics of inserting different types of content into the website and later you can further explore the features for advanced settings.

Changing Your Tagline and Title

Page titles would help your audience to have an idea about your page. It also has a huge impact on the overall rankings and SEO of your webpage on the search engine. Make sure you are using keywords in the title that look natural and relevant.

You can find the taglines added at the bottom of titles on all pages. Our website’s tagline is also known as the “Step by Step Guide”

If you want to change the tagline and title of your website, go to “Settings -> General” and fill out the form:

Disabling Comments for Posts & Pages

Some websites especially business websites don’t allow their visitors to make comments on the page. They do this to avoid any defaming activity performed by any customers or visitors, so they keep their comments off and only show those approved by the admin.

Following are some steps you should follow to shut down the comments from your website.

1. While writing on a new page, in the top right corner, click on “Screen Options”.

2. Click the “Discussion” box section. At the bottom, you will see an “Allow Comments” box.

3. Uncheck “Allow Comments”.

Follow these steps to disable comments on all pages by default.

Go to “Settings -> Discussion” and uncheck “Allow people to post comments on news articles”

Static Front-Page Setting

Static page content doesn’t change. Whenever a visitor comes to your website, it finds the same content every time.

This is how you can set up a static page on your website:

1. Go to “Settings -> Reading”

2. “Front Page” signifies the home page. “Posts page” is your blog’s front page (if you are not running a blog site). Select a static page that you have made.

You have to choose a static page yourself, otherwise, WordPress will take your newest posts and show them on the homepage.

Editing Sidebar

Many of the WordPress themes have a sidebar on the right side or also on the left side in some cases.

If you don’t want sidebars, you can edit the items like “Meta”, “Categories”, and “Archives”, which are pointless typically.

1. In the WordPress Dashboard, go to “Appearance -> Widgets”.

2. Here you can drag and drop to add “boxes” to the sidebar or delete the items.

Here you may also see an “HTML box” that is a text box to use HTML code. If you are a beginner, just drag and drop the items, you want to add in the sidebar.

Grow Your Website

Once you have successfully built your website, the best step is to grow your website. When your website is active and running, now it’s time to attract more visitors to grow your business. some of the major tips that you should follow to grow your website visitors are as follows:

• Review Your Product — have a review on the products and services that you are selling on the website. Doing this you will identify if something is missing especially to induce back customers. you can add an online course and premium for-pay content on the website?
• Affiliate Marketing — Integrating affiliate links on your website is also a method to add to the revenue stream. Essentially, you will promote the product of a brand and offer links to their website. If someone from your audience makes a purchase, you will get a cut of the sale because of your referral.
• Add ads — you should add some good advertising on your blog to get some extra revenue.
• Examine E-commerce Solutions — How are you going to sell your product and get a payment on your website? Before promoting an online store, you should find these answers. In the case of WordPress, it is recommended to use WooCommerce. It is reliable and many websites are using it. Study up on the e-commerce world and pick an online gateway of payment.

Google Analytics and SEO Practices

It is something you should be considering if you want to generate more leads. Google Analytics is a plugin that you can install in your WordPress account and measure your website traffic if also helps you to make better marketing and sales strategies. Install Google Analytics onto your WordPress website to review users’ traffic. Following are some features of Google Analytics that would help you to get an idea about how it works.

• Pageviews — this statistic shows the most popular posts and pages in the previous day, month, and year.
• Bounce Rate — this stat shows the frequency of dreaded “bounce” on your website. It happens when visitors click away from the website after visiting one page;
• Traffic Source — if you have seen a rise in traffic on a particular page, Google Analytics will help you identify the link that is sending the visitors to the website.
• Unique Visitors — this feature of Google Analytics uses IP addresses and tracks how many unique visitors the site is attracting.
• Session duration — this feature is used to check the time durations the visitors stick to your site.

Studying statistics using Google Analytics will help you make solid strategies to attract more visitors and motivate them to stay with you (and buy something).

Once the site is prepped and built to generate leads, you are ready to increase traffic using SEO strategies. SEO is the group of strategies made by site owners to appear closer to the top search engine results.

Let me make it easy for you: when you are searching for something on Google, you probably get your desired information in the first 5 results and you don’t bother to move down further— and the thing applies to your clients. To be visible to your customers you should be on the first page because no one goes to the second make page of Google to find you. Following are some of the major factors that you should be considering to improve your Google ranking.

• Brainstorm Relevant Keywords— you can use Google’s Keyword Planner to discover and research keywords for your site or post content. Search for the phrases and keywords that are more likely to be used by your users while a search on the internet.
• Keep it fresh — New content and Regular updates will give you a boost in the search ranking. But don’t be frightened to repurpose and freshen up old content.
• Blog Posts Optimization— must use these keywords in the content and headings of your posts— but be creative and careful with your settlement to avoid making content that unnatural by keyword stuffing.
• Make a Sitemap — Sitemap is fundamentally a hierarchical list of content and all pages on-site, it would help Google’s crawlers to connect and see the pages on-site by making it easy to present related data in the results of a search.

Tighten Website Security

As far as the security of the site is concerned, it is critical to keep your site safe and eliminate the risks and uncertainty. Following are some steps you can take to improve your site security.

• Enable a Firewall — You might have used a Firewall on your computer to protect it from attacks. You should have a Web Application Firewall (WAF) on your site to make it more secure and safe and reduce uncertainties.
• SSL Security Certificate — The security certifications are very important to your site’s users to ensure that their data is safe and financial transactions are secure. It is good to get SSL.
• Malware Scanning— beware of the hackers because they can mess things up on your site, they can install malware to mess with your code and steal protected information. Scanning for malware regularly will keep your site clean. There are many hosting service providers offering malware scanning to their customers. you can also find a hosting service provider with additional security features.
• Switch to HTTPS — in HTTPS “S” stands for “secure,” and, surprisingly, this version of HTTP is more secure, it allows you to encrypt your data while transferring it to the user’s browser. To improve the security of your site, try to get more SSL/TLS certificates.
• Use Two-Factor Authentication —it is a good way to protect your site from unauthorized access. The two-factor authentication allows you to sign in to the site with a code sent to your mobile device. You may find it annoying but in the long run, it will keep your site secure. You can use “Two-Factor Authentication” a plugin in WordPress.
• Backup Your Site — being in an online business, you always have a threat of hackers. Although you are making good efforts to keep your site secure, security disasters and breaches are still a likelihood. Thus, make sure to back up your site regularly. In this way, if any uncertainty happens, all of your digital properties will be secured.
• Strong Password — Choose a password that is uncommon, long, and only used for your site, don’t make it easy for just anyone to guess your password and get into your device.

Speed Things Up

Nothing is more annoying than a slow site. Following are some of the tips for you to keep your site’s speed up:

• Installing a Caching Plugin— the recently used information in your computer is stored on “cache”, for example, the just visited website’s files. A WordPress caching plugin gets data from the local cache rather than reloading it every time the user accesses it, thus it would help you to improve your website’s speed.
• Speed Testing— Get in the habit of regularly testing your speed, even if your webpage is loading normally. Only type the site’s URL into PageSpeed insights of Google for a quick analysis to get a faster score.
• Images Optimizing— High-resolution images take more time to load. In WordPress go to Media > Bulk Optimization to optimize your images.

Advertisement

Now everything is going right, now it’s time to tell maximum people about it. Advertisement, is very important, even if you are running a small site. There are two major types of advertisement that you should master to attract maximum audiences.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

If you are good at making effective SEO strategies, it will move your site organically to the top of search engine results. By using Pay-Per-Click ads, you will take things more into your control by paying to land atop the search engine result pages. If someone clicks on your link, you have to pay for the premium settlement. You select the keywords to bring up an ad, and you can also set your budget for this.

Social Media Advertising

Facebook is an efficient, data-collection mechanism that you can use to target advertising right to your target audience. You can make your own Facebook ad that can reach many users based on info, for example, gender, age, interests, etc. Through Google Adwords, you will set a budget for clicks. You can also use Instagram and power your stories and feed for some free promotions for your website’s brand. You can use any social media platform to do the marketing and promotion of your business.

Email Marketing

If you are running an e-commerce site then Email is the best tool you can use for finding new customers, maintaining relationships, and bringing back previous ones.

Start with Basics

Get a good knowledge about email marketing online, an effective marketing method involves email address collection to build relationships and share content with potential and current customers.

Email Addresses Collection

Before creating any mail, you must know, where it is going. Don’t be shady and spammy about it; make opt-in forms for directly inviting visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. Try to offer something in return for an email address, for example, a discount, %off on the first purchase, or free ebook access.

Email Newsletter

Email newsletters continue to be the best way to keep your customers engaged, so create one email newsletter and make it the focus of email marketing. You can use it to showcase your brand and voice, share upcoming events and news for business, and present new products (but don’t be forceful). Regularly, send it to your customers, loaded with new content, and then ask for feedback.

Conclusion

In this article, I have shared with you the complete guide to building your business website. Using WordPress is probably the best way to make a website. This article answers the most frequently asked questions such as how to create your site, how to design your website, how to make your web page, what are the methods to setting up a WordPress site, etc. WordPress is an effective tool that you can use to create a website for small business. WordPress is an easy website-building platform, in this article, have discussed different features and functions of WordPress that you can use to build your site.

I hope the information shared is quite useful and will help you to effectively build a website using WordPress. If you still have any questions concerning site building, you can ask me in the comment section below. If you think this article is helpful, do share it in your circle.