Websites, we’ve all heard of them, visited them and benefited from their content, but what exactly is a website? The short answer is that they are documents that are read by web browsers and displayed on your screen.
So how do you build a website? While there are many ways you can go about the process of setting up a website, the popular choice is to enlist the help of a website builder.
With this comprehensive guide, let’s take a look at the basic steps you’ll need to set up a website and all the components you’ll use on your site.
The most important thing you need to do before you start building a website is to decide who you are going to address and to set your company’s goals accordingly!
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Have you decided to set up a website and have you thought about the subject of your site and who you will address? You can easily find the answer to this question by answering a few questions below.
– Do you want to build an e-commerce site or write a blog?
– Which demographics do you want to appeal to?
2. Choose a Website Type
The process of setting up a website starts at the concept stage. This is where you think about what kind of site you want. This idea should be shaped by the purpose you have set for your site and your target audience. You can easily decide this by considering the above points.
If you haven’t yet decided which type of site is best for you, we recommend that you take the time to learn about different types of websites and consider these website ideas. With so many different options out there, this research will help you narrow down your field of study and make an informed decision about your site.
To give you an idea of some of the options, let’s talk about the most popular types of sites and how you can approach their design process:
- An e-commerce site is used to sell products on the internet.
- A blog is a site where you can regularly share information on a specific topic.
- An online portfolio is used to showcase your expertise and experience.
Remember that site types are not completely independent of each other. You can set up an e-commerce site that includes a blog. Or you can create a blog and then sell products.
Once you’ve decided on the type of site you want to build, you can start from scratch or browse ready-made templates categorized by category. This will give you clearer inspiration and help you understand what elements you might want to include on your site.
3. Choose a Domain Name
A domain name is the title and address of your site on the internet. It makes your site easily identifiable and findable on the internet.
Having a custom domain is also important to make your site look professional. When choosing your site’s domain name, we recommend you consider the following tips
- Reflecting your brand name and appropriate to your language
- Use keywords
- You should choose an easy-to-remember address
Then you can move on to the step of choosing a domain that fits your brand and is available. Next, you’ll need to choose a domain extension, such as .com, .net, or .org.
So how do domain names work on Wix? If you publish your site for free without an upgrade, Wix will provide you with a domain. This domain is not fully customizable, but your site will be fully functional.
Alternatively, you can choose to buy a domain so that you can decide the exact name of your site. Wix is a certified domain registrar. This means you can find and register the domain you need for your site directly on the platform, and get an SSL certificate to protect the security of your site and your customers’ information. Don’t forget that when you upgrade your site with Wix, you’ll get a custom domain for free for the first year.
4. Define Hosting Service for Your Site
At this point, you may be wondering how to get your site online and available for visitors to find. Web hosting does just that. So what is web hosting? Hosting services can be thought of as a storage center for your site. It ensures that your site has an online presence and is accessible to everyone on the internet.
Free web hosting is automatically provided when you publish your site with Wix, so you don’t need to find an external host. When you click the “Publish” button, your site is hosted on Wix’s servers. These servers offer advanced security monitoring features to ensure your site is protected.
So what should you look for when choosing hosting?
- Operating system
- Disk space
- E mail service
- Storage space
If you are planning to build a large website, you need to pay attention to disk space and storage space. If you are going to build a quality but heavy video and images or a sales site, such features are very important.
Recommended Hosting Service: HostingFest
5. Choose Which Pages to Add to Your Site
Usually, your site’s goals are reflected in the web pages you choose to create. These pages contain the information you want users to find when they visit your site.
So what is a web page and how is it different from a website? A website is a collection of information about a particular topic or brand hosted on the internet that people can visit. Websites are usually made up of a number of web pages, each with its own unique information.
To decide which pages are best suited to
yoursite, we recommend doing research to understand how your competitors make choices on their sites.
The main types of pages you need to have:
- Home Page
- About Us
- Product Page
- Contact
- Frequently Asked Questions
Home Page
The home page is the most important page of your site, the page that describes your company name, the message you want to convey, or the product or service you sell. Put this information at the top of the page so that visitors can immediately understand what your site is about. You can also direct visitors to different pages through the menus on the home page.
“About Us” Page
Introduce yourself or your company on this page. Talk about your company’s values and try to build a direct relationship with your visitors. If you have more than one person working for your site, introduce them, put their pictures and let your reader see that you are a real structure. This will make people trust you.
Product Page
If you are setting up an e-commerce site, take quality pictures of your products, write clear descriptions, include details of pricing, shipping and cancellation terms. Include payment options and don’t forget to link an online appointment system if you are selling a service.
Contact Page
The page where the details of your company’s address, phone number, e-mail address and social media accounts will be found is the contact page. Apart from these details, you can put a message box or offer a live chat option for them to contact you. Remember, people are satisfied with a company that communicates quickly.
“Frequently Asked Questions” Page
Collect frequently asked questions about your product or service on one page, so that visitors can find the answer to their question there before contacting you. This could include details such as how to use certain products, who to contact in case of any problems, or general cancellation policies.
Each of these may appear on a different page on your site, but together they enrich your site and help you tell a cohesive story. With this in mind, make sure your web pages have a cohesive look and feel together. You can also achieve this by creating a one-page site.
We recommend starting the website building process with your homepage. This is the page that reflects the main idea and purpose of your site.
Additional web pages also ensure that visitors can get all the information they want from you. This could include your contact details, clear presentations of your products or shipping information.
7. Determine Your Design and Content
At this point, you may now be thinking about the design and content that will reveal the personality of your site.
Web design and site content should be parallel and complementary.
They are the key elements that tell the story of your brand and allow your visitors to interact with your site efficiently. Address both elements simultaneously to ensure that your content and design speak the same language and tell a complete story.
This is where you add brand identity. If you have a traditional structure, there’s no need to go crazy. An original post or a nice image is enough to make your site memorable.”
What Should Be in Web Design
Web design encompasses everything you see when you enter a site. These visual elements make it easy for visitors to understand, interact with and emotionally connect with what they see on screen. Design is the most striking and therefore the most important element of any site.
There are many elements that contribute to good web design. Some of the most basic components include colors and navigation (navigation).
Other elements include images, videos, and the way visitors scroll through your site.
Wix offers thousands of integrated design elements to meet these needs. You can use unique shapes and fonts, browse professional images and videos, embed advanced scrolling effects on your site, and more.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the most basic web design elements:
- Colors
- Menus
- Buttons
- Visual elements
- Mobile design
Colors
Colors also have the power to evoke certain emotions. This is why it is so important to tell the world who you are and what you want to do.
Colors can also be used to make certain parts of your website stand out.
We recommend using complementary colors or contrasting tones for various elements on your site. This way, your site looks cohesive and you can draw attention to the most important buttons or elements.
Think about which colors work best for your brand and use a fixed base color with a few secondary colors.
Use colors wisely and with purpose. Reserve the brightest hues for the parts of your site you want to attract the most attention. This also makes certain parts easier to see, making your site more accessible to users with visual impairments.
Menüler
Menü, sitenizin ana navigasyon noktasıdır ve ziyaretçilerin sayfalarınız arasında arama yapmasını sağlar. Ziyaret ettiğimiz herhangi bir sitede düzenli bilgi bulmak istediğimizde ilk baktığımız yerlerden biri menüdür.
What’s more, your menu needs to reflect your site’s goals and align with your web pages. For example, if you sell apparel, you might choose a menu style that categorizes items into categories.
“Remember that the menu is a map of your site. Adding the right pages to your menu in the right order is the cornerstone of your site’s success.”
Buttons
One of the most important parts of a site is the buttons. Buttons take visitors one step further and allow them to interact with your site through actions such as purchasing items, subscribing to your blog or signing up for your services.
Your buttons need to be recognizable and clear. If a visitor is not sure what will happen after clicking a button, they may not click it. Also, a visitor who can’t find the button they are looking for will probably abandon the action altogether.
To avoid these losses, use buttons with clear text or understandable icons.
Give your buttons bright colors like green, orange or something like that. For example, we do not recommend using red as a button color as it gives a sense of stopping or danger for many cultures.
Visual elements
While web design is all about visuals, there are some elements that truly enrich the visual experience. Elements like images, videos, shapes and scrolling effects help to draw the eye and make your site memorable.
With Wix, you can browse the photo and video library to find images that best complement your brand or products. Alternatively, you can upload and edit your own images and videos and easily embed them on your site. You can also experiment with various background options, scrolling effects, and layouts right within the Wix Editor.
How to optimize website images
-Edit your image in Photoshop, Lightroom, or another photo editor.
-Export the image as a JPEG file.
You can use Wix Pro Gallery for this. In addition to these steps, we recommend playing with the photo quality and sharpening settings.
For more information, you can read our article on website image optimization.
Mobile design
Think about how often we use our phones. Recent studies have shown that more than half of the world’s internet usage takes place on mobile devices, and this rate is increasing.
So it’s important to think carefully about the mobile design of your site and make sure that all the elements that work on a computer also work on a phone.
Phone screens are much smaller than typical computer screens, so the site layout and design needs to be different.
- You can emphasize the most important parts of your site by choosing to put the elements you want to show in the first visible section or at the top of your site and leave other information to the background.
- Along these lines, you should make it clear at the top of your site how users can find other pages.
- Many mobile sites use a “hamburger menu”. This menu style is quite common, with three lines across the top of your site. The hamburger menu makes it easy for users to find all relevant web pages.
Content Production
While there are many factors that contribute to a site’s success, it’s important to remember that content comes first. The type of images and textual content added to your site determines the way visitors interact with your site and, in turn, the way they purchase your products or services.
- Your Target Audience: Organize your content according to the needs of your audience, create your content to answer your audience’s questions or find solutions to their problems.
- Tone of Voice: The language you use should be appropriate for your readers or the customers you target, that is, it should reflect your brand. Let’s say if you are setting up a medical site, the language of your site should be in the appropriate medical language and serious.
- Quality: We recommend that you take the time to write about what you want your site to say, research the types of images that will best complement your writing, and consider the advantage of videos.
- Objectives: Your content strategy needs to be aligned with your goals. If you want to encourage visitors to take a specific action on your site, you should make this clear. Alternatively, if your goal is to promote a new product, a promotional video may be the best choice.
Remember that your content can be dynamic and can change in line with your products or offers as they change. You can also adapt your content to better align with your evolving brand. This ensures cohesion between elements and increases your site’s chances of success.
8. Optimize for Search Engines
SEO is a tricky subject that involves many steps, including optimizing the content and design of your site. But don’t be intimidated. With HostingFest.Net SEO, your site is backed by a robust structure that meets the requirements of search engines.
If you’re not familiar with SEO, we recommend using SEO Wiz, a Wix tool that offers a personalized plan for your site. SEO Wiz helps get your site indexed on Google in seconds. So Google can crawl your site and start showing it in search results.
SEO Wiz gives you suggestions on how to change your content and explains how these changes can improve your rankings.
If you choose to optimize your site for search engines yourself, we recommend you follow these SEO tips.
Keywords
When creating the content of your site, think about what kind of searches your potential visitors are doing on the subject of your site, take the important ones from the other options that come up by searching for these words in Google and place them in the important parts of your content. (Title, meta tags and text)
Be careful to write your content naturally and do not use these words too many times, search engines do not consider such articles.
Meta Tags
It consists of three tags called meta title, description and H1.
Meta title: It is the blue text consisting of a maximum of 60 characters describing the content of the page in search engines. You should put your most important keyword in this section.
Meta Description: Just below the blue description is a section of up to 150 characters that gives deeper information about the content of the page. You can place your primary or secondary important keyword in this section.
H1 (Your Post Title): Your main title within your post and again the most important place to use your primary keyword.
Nevigation (Navigation Bar)
To make it easy for your readers to find your content, put your most important pages in your top navigation bar. This way, search engines will understand the importance of the other pages when they land on your site and crawl accordingly.
Internal Linking Strategy
The strategy of linking to other pages using keywords within your articles, this way you are easily directing readers to pages where they can find useful information and again allowing search engines to easily find your other pages.
ALT Texts
The ALT Text section is another place where you can write a description of your images and use your keywords. It also helps visually impaired visitors to understand your images.
Site Map
It is the index of all the pages of your website. Search engines discover all your pages through this index.
Wix also offers SEO tools for advanced users to optimize their sites however they want. These include a robots.txt editor, dynamic XML sitemaps, customizable canonical tags, and more.
Local SEO
Speaking of SEO, let’s talk about how you can rank high in search engines if you have a physical store. Local SEO refers to ranking your physical store high in local searches.
If you want your store information to rank high in Google search results, it is useful to follow these steps:
- Create a Google “My Business” profile and add all your information.
- Keep your business hours, pricing, contact details, etc. up to date.
- Verify the location of your business.
- Monitor, regularly respond and manage comments.
- Add photos of your business (images always help!).
- Accurately mark your business location on other online maps and directories.
9. Work on Digital Marketing
SEO is a time-consuming marketing method. If you don’t want to wait and you have a little budget to allocate for this, you can pay for certain words in the top ranks on the internet via PPC, i.e. Google Adwords, and take place in the form of advertisements.
10. Analyze Your Site Performance
Another important step to ensure your site is optimized and successful are web analytics tools. These tools help you understand how successful your site is and how visitors interact with it. So you can identify pain points and make informed decisions.
- Google Search Console; With this tool, you can track the number of clicks your pages receive, the average Google ranking and whether there are any indexing problems on your pages.
- Heatmaps; By utilizing popular heatmaps available on the market, you can track how your visitors move around your pages. A few examples of this tool that allows you to watch all the details in video form, from where they click to how much of the page they read: Hotjar, and LuzkyOrange.
This data can then be used to improve your site. For example, if you notice that one product is selling more than another, you might consider displaying it more prominently. Or if one blog post is being read more than another, you might consider why and tailor future posts accordingly. These kinds of decisions will help your site succeed in the long run.
How Much Does a Website Cost?
If you just want to make a website as a domain binding, prices range from $2 per month to $14,90 per month as VIP.
If you want to set up an e-commerce site and are curious about other details, you can check out our Premium Packages page.
Conclusion
Just like people, each site has its own unique needs. Try to identify them and think about what goals you need to achieve to build a truly original and successful website.
