10 Steps to Take Before Building Your Website
For your website to be a success, like with most large projects, you need much planning and preparation before you even begin building it. If you do your groundwork well, though, launching the website and maintaining it will be much easier in the future.
To make these preparations simpler for you, I made this list of 10 steps you need to take before building your website.
1. Decide on the purpose of your website
The most essential thing is to clearly understand why you need a website and what you want to achieve with it. This will define the type of site you are building. Whether it’s a website for your portfolio, an online shop, or an informational platform, you should always keep the purpose of your website in mind. Every part of your site should be organized around its purpose.
2. Know your target audience
Based on the purpose of your website, you should identify what people you expect to visit it. For whom do you create your website? How old are these people? What do they do in life? What are their interests? What do they want? Keep in mind that everything in your website should speak directly to your target audience.
3. Find examples
Once you’ve established the purpose and target audience of your website, you should find similar sites and check how they are organized. It can give you ideas and inspiration on the look of your own website and the elements it should include.
4. Choose your website’s design
Now that you’ve worked on the first 3 steps, you should be better prepared to choose the look of your website, the sections it will include, and the way it will be organized. You want your website to be user-friendly, easy to navigate, and appealing. Think about the sections and menus your website will have. Choose the colors and fonts. Try sketching the layout.
5. Learn SEO
When your website is SEO-optimized, people can find it in search engines. The better your site’s ranking, the more people will visit it. There’re many aspects to SEO: all the links working on your website, proper keywords for your content, alt-tags for images, good meta descriptions, and so on. It is difficult to get every SEO aspect right at once. So you should start learning now not to make all the newbie mistakes when you launch your site.
6. Choose backend
You can start coding your website from scratch or use one of the Content Management Systems (CMS) to make your task easier. An additional benefit of CMS is that many of them already have SEO-optimized code. Different CMS work better for different purposes. For example, WordPress is ideal for text-based websites, while Magento for ecommerce sites.
7. Plan content
You should plan what type of text content you will have on your website. Think about its style, length, themes, and placement. It is better to start writing content for your website in advance. This way when you launch the website, you can already post something there.
8. Find images
Now that you generally know how your website will look, it’s time to prepare images for it. If you store them somewhere in advance, it will make your task easier when launching the website. If you don’t create the images for your site yourself, make sure that the ones you use are not copyrighted.
9. Choose and buy your domain name
Your domain name should be catchy, not too long, and easy to remember. Also, make sure that it is difficult to make a spelling mistake when writing it. Many good .com domain names are already taken. But you shouldn’t restrict yourself only to .com domains. There are many other interesting tlds out there that may serve your purpose even better, like .art, .app, .best, .blog, etc.
10. Choose your hosting provider
Apart from a domain name, you need a hosting provider to start launching your website. When you choose, pay attention to the price and unbiased user reviews. Also, make sure that they host the type of CMS you will use and ensure all the website functions you need.
I am sure that if you take these 10 steps before building your site, the launching process itself should be a breeze, and your website will be great. Good luck!
