How to build your own website

In 2020, it’s more important than ever that any business has its own website. The same is true for a multi-national corporation as a single freelancer or sole trader, as the internet is where we conduct research to find products to buy, services to use, and partners for collaboration.

But how do you set up your own website? Here’s a simple guide on putting it together for the first time.

Get your domain and hosting

Every website needs a domain name – the URL that people will type into their internet browser in order to find the site. Whether you opt for a .co.za or a .org, a .shop or something related to your country of residence, you have to choose both the name itself and the extension.

You can purchase your domain from any domain seller, and the next thing you will need is hosting. Hosting is like renting the digital space for your website, just like you would need to rent a physical space for your office or store. The good news is that hosting is much cheaper, although having a website isn’t free – there are lots of processes and plenty of energy that goes into keeping a website live.

You can get both domain and hosting from the same company, or shop separately, according to your preference.

Find or build a template

The next thing is to put the site itself together. Those with experience in coding will be able to build the site from scratch themselves, but if this is your first time, you’ll want to use a template instead.

There are plenty of services that offer templates – WordPress is the most popular, but you could also go a website builder such as SitePro. These sites allow you to choose and then customise a pre-built template which gives you the basis for your site layout and design. It’s simple to do and may take hours, as opposed to the days or even weeks of building from code.

Connect everything together

The final thing you need to do is get everything connected together. You can apply your hosting and your template to your domain name, so that when someone enters your URL, they come to view the website that you have just set up without any issues.

This can be a complicated process if you don’t know what you are doing, but most template sites will show you how to connect your domain and your hosting. You can also call their helpline for extra assistance. No matter what you do, be careful not to change something which is not in the instructions, because you could mess up your site completely!

Building a site from scratch can be daunting to those who haven’t done it before, but thanks to the convenience and proliferation of smart tools these days, it’s never been easier to build your own website. You can be up and running within the same day that you had the idea!