Everyone needs a website these days. Whether that’s a blog, or a business home page. Having a Facebook page and a Twitter account are both great to engage with your friends, customers and community. But ultimately you need a place to call your own. A website with your own domain name, where you call the shots.
Getting Started
The first thing that you should do is sit down with a pen and paper. Crazy as it may seem, starting your website plans offline is the the best way to do it. Consider what you want to achieve with your site. Write down a sentence that captures what you want to achieve.
What’s your strategy?
For example, for a small business it might be:
My website is to promote Widgets Inc. and sell widgets online
Or :
Promote Sally’s Cakes locally to increase sales in the shop.
For a student it might be:
Start a blog to share my thoughts and great ideas with the world
There’s no right or wrong here, but it’s important that you have a clear idea of your website’s purpose before you start building it. This strategy will determine the layout, look and feel, functionality and content of your site.
Plan it out
Take some paper and plan the elements of your site. Are you going to have pages that describe your business, a blog, a contact form, a list of products? Map out the structure so that you can clearly picture how users are going to navigate your site.
Look & Feel
What sort of graphic design are you going to use? Do you want to look corporate, homely or clean and modern? Brellabee has over 250 themes to choose from, with many Premium themes from WooThemes. Canvasis one of our favorites, because it allows you to create a great looking site from the ground up, with heaps of options to customise the colors and fonts. Canvas also features a couple of different sliders to show off your content in an engaging way, as well as a portfolio section. Is your site going to have one, two or three columns? What’s going to be on the front page, you latest blog posts, or text about you or your business?
Content, content, content…
Websites need content. This will be in the form of text, images, videos, links to other websites, links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and so on. Content drives people to your site. The type of content (otherwise known as copy) will also come from your strategy for the site. You will need a blog. Your blog should consist of regular updates about you or your business, and should form part of your content marketing strategy. Regular posts help to bring traffic to your site. And success on the Internet is all about traffic. See 10 tips for better copy for ideas about how to write engaging copy. Also we recommend CopyBlogger’s 20 Part email course on writing good copy.
Choose a Platform
We recommend WordPress, and if you don’t know your MySQL from your HTML then we recommend you start your site with Brellabee. WordPress is a simple and intuitive content management system (CMS) and blogging platform that is used to power over 15% of the world’s websites. Brellabee makes it easy to start your website, and has heaps of features. Create your website now
I love your hover button – shadow is BOSS!
Hey, thanks @mrmag! I picked that technique up from a couple of tuts on the web. It uses the CSS transition property. Let me know if I can help out in any way.
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