Starting your first website

In this week’s blog post we will be taking you through the steps for making your first website.

Choose a name for your website

You may already have a name in mind, for example, if you are making a website for your own business. If not, think of a name that will relate to the business area your site will be about.

You can use our Domain Checker to see if your domain is available to buy, and also check which TLD’s are available.

TLD stands for Top Level Domain, and they include .co.za .org, .net and so on.

Generally speaking, a .co.za domain is good for a South Africa business and .com has a more international flavour. There are also a number of specific TLDs such as .joburg, .durban, .capetown, .africa, these may be suitable for your business also.

Building the website

There are a number of ways of building your website, depending on the complexity and requirements of the site.

Online Website Creators

Services like Wix and Squarespace allow you to build a website with no technical knowledge, and many people find they can create a nice looking site in a few hours.

They typically use a drag and drop interface that is easy to use, but the downside is these types of sites tend to have limited functions and are tricky to customise in terms of adding functionality.

Depending on the package you sign up for you may be stuck with the company’s name in your domain name, like yoursite.thewebbuilder.com.
Hosting with web builder sites can also be fairly expensive when compared to other hosting solutions, although they do usually have good quality technical support that will fix your site for you.

Web Hosting 4 South Africa offers our state of the art website builder free of charge with all our hosting packages.

Content Management Systems

Content management systems (also known as CMSs) include WordPress, Drupal, and Magento. WordPress is the most popular CMS today, and it is used in more than 29% of the world’s websites.

CMSs can be used with no coding or technical expertise, but can also be highly customised by web professionals.

Most of the top CMSs have vast libraries of plugins, addons, and themes that you can install to modify your site, and if you should run into any problems there are developer and user support forums available to help you.

If you are looking to take your first steps into coding, or are just looking for more functionality than an online drag and drop site can offer, using a CMS might be the choice for you.

Hire a web developer

If you don’t have the technical skills or the time to build your own site, you should consider hiring a web developer to build it for you.

The upside of this option is that you will get a site built to your requirements by a web professional (ask to see some of their work before hiring them!).

However, having a site built can be expensive, particularly if you want a complex website. You may also be reliant on the developer for maintaining your site in the future.

Choose the right hosting package

Generally speaking, our Web Hosting package is fine for most small to medium sites.

We have scalable solutions for your website regardless of your requirements, if you are unsure of which hosting to get then please GET IN TOUCH, we will be happy to advise you.