Sami Ketolainen
Restricted (Market)
- Impact
- 1,430
Hello NamePros community!
I have seen many type of people here. I have seen too that many persons are interested about web development, website designing and anything related to the websites. So, I decided to start to write this post to everyone who needs helps if they can't get started.
There are over 200 million websites online and most of them is created by normal persons like me and you. Nowadays, anyone can create website, regardless technical skill level.
There are two ways to start build you own website: Website Builders and WordPress. Website Builders are the best way if you are looking for the easiest solution and you are beginner in these things.
Website Builders are great option if you don't have skill to code, you want to focus on the content on your website and to strategy, value all-in-one convenience and you are going to start selling something online.
WordPress is your solution if you are independent, you want backend controls and great tools for customize your website and with WordPress you can create bigger projects.
Let's take a look for both of these styles - I'm sure that someone is reallu surprised how easily it can be to build your own website with rights tools.
Option 1 - Using website builders.
Step 1: Choosing your website builder.
Many people around the world are using website builders to create a website. Popular builders are Wix, Shopify, BoldGrid, Weebly, Squarespace, iPage Builder, GoDaddy Website Builder and Webs.
Website builders mean anybody can make a website, regardless of technical skill. In the early days of the internet, making a website required a working understanding of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).Then CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) came along to make things even more confusing.
Website builders take care of the technical jargon and let you focus on design and content. Some do this through templates, others through drag and drop interfaces. Some are even dabbling in artificial intelligence that builds the site for you
Let's take a look little bit closer these builders one by one.
1. Wix.com
Wix is cloud based website builder. It is really easy to use combined with powerful features to build your own website.
Wix is a fully hosted platform, so you will not have to pay for hosting. You get access to hundreds of templates to choose for your website’s design. Each template is fully editable with their intuitive drag and drop site builder.
It also comes with dozens of free and paid apps that you can install on your website. These apps allow you to add new features and functionality to your website. Some of them are created by Wix, and others are created by third-party developers.
2. Shopify
Shopify is a website builder designed specifically for online stores and e-commerce websites.
It offers integrated payment solution called Shopify Payments. You can also add third-party payment gateways to accept payments.
As an e-commerce website builder, Shopify comes with full inventory management, unlimited products, powerful stats, easy marketing solutions, all neatly wrapped under one roof. They have hundreds of designs to choose from, and you will never need to add code.
3. BoldGrid
BoldGrid is a new kind of website builder that is built on top of WordPress. It is available as a standalone WordPress plugin as well as a fully hosted website builder suite.
BoldGrid is built on top of WordPress, so you get full advantage of WordPress with a customized user experience. BoldGrid’s website builder allows you to choose a professional design from their gallery of themes.
After that you can customize those designs with a drag and drop customizer. You can point and click on any item in the preview section to edit its properties. You can change colors, fonts, layouts, navigation menus, and widgets with ease.
4. Weebly
Weebly is an easy to use website builder with tons of great designs. It includes a beautifully crafted page builder which allows you to edit your website without learning any coding skills.
Weebly is a fully hosted platform, so you don’t need to install and manage any software. They take care of hosting your website and managing all the software that runs in the backend.
It comes with dozens of website designs to use as an starting point for your website. These gorgeous designs are fully editable using Weebly’s live page editor.
5. Squarespace
Squarespace is a popular fully hosted website builder known for its great designs and ease of use.
Squarespace comes with enterprise grade infrastructure for hosting your website. This secure and robust platform allows you to focus on growing your business without worrying about hosting.
Squarespace includes tons of website designs to get started. All of these designs are fully ready for all types of content. They are fully editable, and Squarespace even allows you to use multiple templates for the same website at once.
6. iPage Builder
iPage Website Builder is another easy to use tool to build your website. It is sold as an addon to the hosting services provided by iPage.
iPage Website Builder is a simple drag and drop website builder. A limited version of the builder is available with your iPage hosting account for free. You can upgrade it to professional or business plan to get unlimited features.
The website builder tool includes 100+ professionally designed and mobile-responsive templates. You can apply these templates to your website with one click.
7. GoDaddy Website Builder
GoDaddy is one of the largest domain name and hosting service providers in the world. They offer a simple and elegant website builder complete with hosting included.
GoDaddy Website Builder is a simple and easy tool to create professional looking websites. It comes pre-loaded with several ready to use blocks that you can drag and drop to build different layouts.
It also has integrated photo library with professional images from Getty Photography that you can use on your website. You can also upload your own photos and create image galleries.
8. Webs
Webs offers a simple website builder platform suitable for small business and personal websites. It has an intuitive easy to use builder, with pre-made website designs, and a powerful set of features.
Webs is a fully hosted platform, so you don’t have to worry about the software, updates, or backups.
It has an intuitive website builder that lets you choose from dozens of professional website designs. Each design comes with simple customization options that you can configure from the builder itself.
You can edit any item on a page with simple point and click interface. You can also drag and drop commonly used items like images, videos, photo gallery, text, columns, maps, and contact forms.
Step 2: Test different builders
Test builders, get known with them. Every builder offers different features than others. You find the right builder - What is easiest to use for you. Almost every website builders offers free trials so take advantage from it.
Step 3: Choose the right domain
Well, I think I don't have to explain this part now, I think here is people who knows everything what is needed to know about domains.
Step 4: What is the right template for my use?
You’re ready now to start creating a website. Rather than leaving you to do this all by yourself, website builders support you through the process with templates. Whichever website builder you’ve chosen, you’ll have an extensive selection of design templates to choose from. The top builders provide hundreds of templates across dozens of categories. Whatever the focus of your site is, there will be a template for it.
Think of templates as ‘clothes’ for your website. If you don’t like one set of clothes, just change to another one to give your website a completely different feel. And again, don’t rush into it. Choose different templates, browse them, see if they fit. The whole point of templates is choice, so dive in and find one that feels right for what you want to achieve.
Step 5: Customize your template
Building a website is like cooking a dinner. Just like cooking, knowing how to build a website from scratch is much easier with the right tools and instructions. A template gives you a recipe — you can choose to follow it or you can mix up the ingredients and style to give your dish your own flavor.
Website builders are very flexible these days. Customization can include example adding new pages to the navigation, changing colors,size and fonts, adding new elements and much more. The best website builders walk you through all these things.
Step 6: Preview your website and test it
Always preview changes to your website before publishing them. You need to be sure things are working the way you want them to.
Website builders make previewing your site really easy. Usually you just have to hit the preview button in the editor mode to see what your website would look like. Most offer a toggle so you can see how it works on different screen sizes.
An easy-to-use preview mode saves you a lot of time as you won’t need to keep saving changes and switching back and forth between editor and preview mode. You can make a change and then just hit preview to see how it would look live.
Step 7: You are ready!
Happy for the result? I hope you are, because you are now on point when your website is ready go to live. Now your job is to get your website popular. Inform people you know that you have a website, use social media to advertise your website, list your website to directories, advertise at forums.. Here starts the real work!
Option 2 - Using WordPress.
Step 1 - Is WordPress right option for you?
Almost a third of all websites are built on WordPress. It requires more setup work and maintenance than most website builders do. The first step of building a website using WordPress is taking stock and knowing what you’re signing up for.
WordPress is not an all-in-one package. It’s a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS allows you to create and organize digital content. Other elements like hosting and domain registration are best done separately. It’s up to you to bring these together in service of a WordPress site.
Step 2 - Choosing hosting plan
There are various types and tiers of hosting designed for everything from tiny blogs to online stores with millions of visitors per month.
Step 3 - Choose the domain name
There is no need to explain this part.
Step 4 - Install your WordPress site
Once you sign up to a hosting plan, an account will be made for you automatically, though setting up a WordPress requires something from you: a click.
WordPress’s massive popularity means it’s in the interest of hosting providers to make setup easy. Accordingly, most offer one-click WordPress installation.
If you bought a domain name as part of signing up, a WordPress site will already be there (a no-click setup!).
Step 5 - Choose the right theme for your use
While website builders have templates, WordPress has themes. Your theme affects how your site looks. There are free themes and paid themes, and you can change your website’s theme as often as you want.
The upside with free themes is the cost, obviously, though bear in mind a nice free theme is likely being used on a lot of sites already. Paid themes are more ‘exclusive’ in that sense.
Best places to find themes are: WordPress Theme Directory, MOJO Marketplace, Theme Forest, Elegant Themes, CSSIgniter and StudioPress.
Let's take a look little bit closer these websites one by one.
1. WordPress Theme Directory
If you are looking for a free WordPress theme, then WordPress.org is the best place to start your search. With 4800+ free themes, it is the largest collection of free WordPress themes.
The advantage of choosing a theme from WordPress.org is that they are included after a rigorous review process. This means that these themes strictly adhere to WordPress theme directory guidelines and follow the official best practices.
2. MOJO Marketplace
MOJO Marketplace is a large marketplace for WordPress themes, plugins, and services. At the time of writing this article, they have more than 7900 items on sale, including 900+ premium themes. You’ll also find their WordPress services offered by top WordPress hosting companies like Bluehost.
Each theme at MOJO Marketplace goes through a manual submission process. Their review team examines each theme carefully to ensure high quality coding standards.
3. Theme Forest
Themeforest is part of Envato family, a large network of design, graphics, audio, and video marketplace. Themeforest offers a large collection of premium WordPress themes neatly organized in categories and easily searchable.
Some of the themes available on Themeforest are among the top selling WordPress themes of all times. Each theme developer is responsible for offering full support and documentation for their products. Most items are offered on a 6-month license period including support and updates.
4. Elegant Themes
Elegant Themes is one of the oldest and most well-known WordPress theme shops. Elegant Themes offers premium WordPress themes, plugins, and one of the best drag and drop page builder in the market, The Divi Builder.
Unlike theme marketplaces mentioned in the list, Elegant Themes develops and sells their own themes. This ensures that you get quality code, optimized for speed and performance, and compatibility with a wide range of WordPress plugins and tools.
5. CSSIgniter
CSSIgniter offers a large collection of premium WordPress themes for almost any kind of website. With more than 80 premium themes, CSSIgniter is catering the needs of WordPress developers and website owners since 2010.
They have some of the best WordPress themes for restaurants, hotel themes, magazine, and business themes in the market. All their themes are beginner friendly, come with flexible features, and easier customization options.
6. StudioPress
StudioPress is one of the most recognizable names in WordPress themes industry. They are the creators of Genesis theme framework which provides a rock-solid foundation for developing high quality WordPress themes.
StudioPress offers their own WordPress themes and themes developed by third-party developers. All themes available in their marketplace are Genesis child themes.
Step 6 - Create pages and content
Adding content to WordPress is much more structured than you might think. Content on WordPress sites essentially breaks down into two types: pages and posts. What they look like will depend on the theme you use.
Pages are static one-off pages that make up the backbone of your site. Your homepage and contact page would be pages, for example. Posts are more timely. If your site has a blog, each entry in that blog would be a post.
Creating pages and posts is easy. Both require a couple of clicks in the WordPress dashboard. For pages you go to ‘Pages’ and ‘Add New’. For posts you go to ‘Posts’ and ‘Add New’. Both ‘Add New’ options will take you to the editor, where you can add content, preview, and publish.
To add pages to your main menu you simply go to ‘Appearance’ and ‘Menus’. From there you can select which pages appear in which menus. For most sites and most themes you’ll only need one navigation menu, so putting one together is easy.
Step 7 - Install plugins
Plugins are bits of software that can be added to WordPress to improve the functionality of your site. Default features offer enough to make a perfectly good website, but plugins are often necessary to take it to the next level.
WordPress has tens of thousands of plugins for everything from search engine optimization (SEO) to image compression. Browse the WordPress plugin directory and you’ll soon get a sense of how vibrant and creative a community it is. Each plugin has its own page with descriptions, screenshots, user reviews and more.
To install plugins it’s easier to browse within your WordPress dashboard. To do this go to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’. There you can sort through featured, popular, and recommended plugins, as well as search for them yourself. To install simply press ‘Install Now’.
Step 8: You are ready!
Happy for the result? I hope you are, because you are now on point when your website is ready go to live. Now your job is to get your website popular. Inform people you know that you have a website, use social media to advertise your website, list your website to directories, advertise at forums.. Here starts the real work!
Hopefully you enjoyed reading this post. I will create next post about how to design your website and how to make it look perfect for and and especially for you customer.
If you need some ideas to your websites, reviews or appraisal - Feel free to message me. I can give you pretty detailed review about your current website.
Thanks
Sami Ketolainen
I have seen many type of people here. I have seen too that many persons are interested about web development, website designing and anything related to the websites. So, I decided to start to write this post to everyone who needs helps if they can't get started.
There are over 200 million websites online and most of them is created by normal persons like me and you. Nowadays, anyone can create website, regardless technical skill level.
There are two ways to start build you own website: Website Builders and WordPress. Website Builders are the best way if you are looking for the easiest solution and you are beginner in these things.
Website Builders are great option if you don't have skill to code, you want to focus on the content on your website and to strategy, value all-in-one convenience and you are going to start selling something online.
WordPress is your solution if you are independent, you want backend controls and great tools for customize your website and with WordPress you can create bigger projects.
Let's take a look for both of these styles - I'm sure that someone is reallu surprised how easily it can be to build your own website with rights tools.
Option 1 - Using website builders.
Step 1: Choosing your website builder.
Many people around the world are using website builders to create a website. Popular builders are Wix, Shopify, BoldGrid, Weebly, Squarespace, iPage Builder, GoDaddy Website Builder and Webs.
Website builders mean anybody can make a website, regardless of technical skill. In the early days of the internet, making a website required a working understanding of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).Then CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) came along to make things even more confusing.
Website builders take care of the technical jargon and let you focus on design and content. Some do this through templates, others through drag and drop interfaces. Some are even dabbling in artificial intelligence that builds the site for you
Let's take a look little bit closer these builders one by one.
1. Wix.com
Wix is cloud based website builder. It is really easy to use combined with powerful features to build your own website.
Wix is a fully hosted platform, so you will not have to pay for hosting. You get access to hundreds of templates to choose for your website’s design. Each template is fully editable with their intuitive drag and drop site builder.
It also comes with dozens of free and paid apps that you can install on your website. These apps allow you to add new features and functionality to your website. Some of them are created by Wix, and others are created by third-party developers.
2. Shopify
Shopify is a website builder designed specifically for online stores and e-commerce websites.
It offers integrated payment solution called Shopify Payments. You can also add third-party payment gateways to accept payments.
As an e-commerce website builder, Shopify comes with full inventory management, unlimited products, powerful stats, easy marketing solutions, all neatly wrapped under one roof. They have hundreds of designs to choose from, and you will never need to add code.
3. BoldGrid
BoldGrid is a new kind of website builder that is built on top of WordPress. It is available as a standalone WordPress plugin as well as a fully hosted website builder suite.
BoldGrid is built on top of WordPress, so you get full advantage of WordPress with a customized user experience. BoldGrid’s website builder allows you to choose a professional design from their gallery of themes.
After that you can customize those designs with a drag and drop customizer. You can point and click on any item in the preview section to edit its properties. You can change colors, fonts, layouts, navigation menus, and widgets with ease.
4. Weebly
Weebly is an easy to use website builder with tons of great designs. It includes a beautifully crafted page builder which allows you to edit your website without learning any coding skills.
Weebly is a fully hosted platform, so you don’t need to install and manage any software. They take care of hosting your website and managing all the software that runs in the backend.
It comes with dozens of website designs to use as an starting point for your website. These gorgeous designs are fully editable using Weebly’s live page editor.
5. Squarespace
Squarespace is a popular fully hosted website builder known for its great designs and ease of use.
Squarespace comes with enterprise grade infrastructure for hosting your website. This secure and robust platform allows you to focus on growing your business without worrying about hosting.
Squarespace includes tons of website designs to get started. All of these designs are fully ready for all types of content. They are fully editable, and Squarespace even allows you to use multiple templates for the same website at once.
6. iPage Builder
iPage Website Builder is another easy to use tool to build your website. It is sold as an addon to the hosting services provided by iPage.
iPage Website Builder is a simple drag and drop website builder. A limited version of the builder is available with your iPage hosting account for free. You can upgrade it to professional or business plan to get unlimited features.
The website builder tool includes 100+ professionally designed and mobile-responsive templates. You can apply these templates to your website with one click.
7. GoDaddy Website Builder
GoDaddy is one of the largest domain name and hosting service providers in the world. They offer a simple and elegant website builder complete with hosting included.
GoDaddy Website Builder is a simple and easy tool to create professional looking websites. It comes pre-loaded with several ready to use blocks that you can drag and drop to build different layouts.
It also has integrated photo library with professional images from Getty Photography that you can use on your website. You can also upload your own photos and create image galleries.
8. Webs
Webs offers a simple website builder platform suitable for small business and personal websites. It has an intuitive easy to use builder, with pre-made website designs, and a powerful set of features.
Webs is a fully hosted platform, so you don’t have to worry about the software, updates, or backups.
It has an intuitive website builder that lets you choose from dozens of professional website designs. Each design comes with simple customization options that you can configure from the builder itself.
You can edit any item on a page with simple point and click interface. You can also drag and drop commonly used items like images, videos, photo gallery, text, columns, maps, and contact forms.
Step 2: Test different builders
Test builders, get known with them. Every builder offers different features than others. You find the right builder - What is easiest to use for you. Almost every website builders offers free trials so take advantage from it.
Step 3: Choose the right domain
Well, I think I don't have to explain this part now, I think here is people who knows everything what is needed to know about domains.
Step 4: What is the right template for my use?
You’re ready now to start creating a website. Rather than leaving you to do this all by yourself, website builders support you through the process with templates. Whichever website builder you’ve chosen, you’ll have an extensive selection of design templates to choose from. The top builders provide hundreds of templates across dozens of categories. Whatever the focus of your site is, there will be a template for it.
Think of templates as ‘clothes’ for your website. If you don’t like one set of clothes, just change to another one to give your website a completely different feel. And again, don’t rush into it. Choose different templates, browse them, see if they fit. The whole point of templates is choice, so dive in and find one that feels right for what you want to achieve.
Step 5: Customize your template
Building a website is like cooking a dinner. Just like cooking, knowing how to build a website from scratch is much easier with the right tools and instructions. A template gives you a recipe — you can choose to follow it or you can mix up the ingredients and style to give your dish your own flavor.
Website builders are very flexible these days. Customization can include example adding new pages to the navigation, changing colors,size and fonts, adding new elements and much more. The best website builders walk you through all these things.
Step 6: Preview your website and test it
Always preview changes to your website before publishing them. You need to be sure things are working the way you want them to.
Website builders make previewing your site really easy. Usually you just have to hit the preview button in the editor mode to see what your website would look like. Most offer a toggle so you can see how it works on different screen sizes.
An easy-to-use preview mode saves you a lot of time as you won’t need to keep saving changes and switching back and forth between editor and preview mode. You can make a change and then just hit preview to see how it would look live.
Step 7: You are ready!
Happy for the result? I hope you are, because you are now on point when your website is ready go to live. Now your job is to get your website popular. Inform people you know that you have a website, use social media to advertise your website, list your website to directories, advertise at forums.. Here starts the real work!
Option 2 - Using WordPress.
Step 1 - Is WordPress right option for you?
Almost a third of all websites are built on WordPress. It requires more setup work and maintenance than most website builders do. The first step of building a website using WordPress is taking stock and knowing what you’re signing up for.
WordPress is not an all-in-one package. It’s a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS allows you to create and organize digital content. Other elements like hosting and domain registration are best done separately. It’s up to you to bring these together in service of a WordPress site.
Step 2 - Choosing hosting plan
There are various types and tiers of hosting designed for everything from tiny blogs to online stores with millions of visitors per month.
Step 3 - Choose the domain name
There is no need to explain this part.
Step 4 - Install your WordPress site
Once you sign up to a hosting plan, an account will be made for you automatically, though setting up a WordPress requires something from you: a click.
WordPress’s massive popularity means it’s in the interest of hosting providers to make setup easy. Accordingly, most offer one-click WordPress installation.
If you bought a domain name as part of signing up, a WordPress site will already be there (a no-click setup!).
Step 5 - Choose the right theme for your use
While website builders have templates, WordPress has themes. Your theme affects how your site looks. There are free themes and paid themes, and you can change your website’s theme as often as you want.
The upside with free themes is the cost, obviously, though bear in mind a nice free theme is likely being used on a lot of sites already. Paid themes are more ‘exclusive’ in that sense.
Best places to find themes are: WordPress Theme Directory, MOJO Marketplace, Theme Forest, Elegant Themes, CSSIgniter and StudioPress.
Let's take a look little bit closer these websites one by one.
1. WordPress Theme Directory
If you are looking for a free WordPress theme, then WordPress.org is the best place to start your search. With 4800+ free themes, it is the largest collection of free WordPress themes.
The advantage of choosing a theme from WordPress.org is that they are included after a rigorous review process. This means that these themes strictly adhere to WordPress theme directory guidelines and follow the official best practices.
2. MOJO Marketplace
MOJO Marketplace is a large marketplace for WordPress themes, plugins, and services. At the time of writing this article, they have more than 7900 items on sale, including 900+ premium themes. You’ll also find their WordPress services offered by top WordPress hosting companies like Bluehost.
Each theme at MOJO Marketplace goes through a manual submission process. Their review team examines each theme carefully to ensure high quality coding standards.
3. Theme Forest
Themeforest is part of Envato family, a large network of design, graphics, audio, and video marketplace. Themeforest offers a large collection of premium WordPress themes neatly organized in categories and easily searchable.
Some of the themes available on Themeforest are among the top selling WordPress themes of all times. Each theme developer is responsible for offering full support and documentation for their products. Most items are offered on a 6-month license period including support and updates.
4. Elegant Themes
Elegant Themes is one of the oldest and most well-known WordPress theme shops. Elegant Themes offers premium WordPress themes, plugins, and one of the best drag and drop page builder in the market, The Divi Builder.
Unlike theme marketplaces mentioned in the list, Elegant Themes develops and sells their own themes. This ensures that you get quality code, optimized for speed and performance, and compatibility with a wide range of WordPress plugins and tools.
5. CSSIgniter
CSSIgniter offers a large collection of premium WordPress themes for almost any kind of website. With more than 80 premium themes, CSSIgniter is catering the needs of WordPress developers and website owners since 2010.
They have some of the best WordPress themes for restaurants, hotel themes, magazine, and business themes in the market. All their themes are beginner friendly, come with flexible features, and easier customization options.
6. StudioPress
StudioPress is one of the most recognizable names in WordPress themes industry. They are the creators of Genesis theme framework which provides a rock-solid foundation for developing high quality WordPress themes.
StudioPress offers their own WordPress themes and themes developed by third-party developers. All themes available in their marketplace are Genesis child themes.
Step 6 - Create pages and content
Adding content to WordPress is much more structured than you might think. Content on WordPress sites essentially breaks down into two types: pages and posts. What they look like will depend on the theme you use.
Pages are static one-off pages that make up the backbone of your site. Your homepage and contact page would be pages, for example. Posts are more timely. If your site has a blog, each entry in that blog would be a post.
Creating pages and posts is easy. Both require a couple of clicks in the WordPress dashboard. For pages you go to ‘Pages’ and ‘Add New’. For posts you go to ‘Posts’ and ‘Add New’. Both ‘Add New’ options will take you to the editor, where you can add content, preview, and publish.
To add pages to your main menu you simply go to ‘Appearance’ and ‘Menus’. From there you can select which pages appear in which menus. For most sites and most themes you’ll only need one navigation menu, so putting one together is easy.
Step 7 - Install plugins
Plugins are bits of software that can be added to WordPress to improve the functionality of your site. Default features offer enough to make a perfectly good website, but plugins are often necessary to take it to the next level.
WordPress has tens of thousands of plugins for everything from search engine optimization (SEO) to image compression. Browse the WordPress plugin directory and you’ll soon get a sense of how vibrant and creative a community it is. Each plugin has its own page with descriptions, screenshots, user reviews and more.
To install plugins it’s easier to browse within your WordPress dashboard. To do this go to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’. There you can sort through featured, popular, and recommended plugins, as well as search for them yourself. To install simply press ‘Install Now’.
Step 8: You are ready!
Happy for the result? I hope you are, because you are now on point when your website is ready go to live. Now your job is to get your website popular. Inform people you know that you have a website, use social media to advertise your website, list your website to directories, advertise at forums.. Here starts the real work!
Hopefully you enjoyed reading this post. I will create next post about how to design your website and how to make it look perfect for and and especially for you customer.
If you need some ideas to your websites, reviews or appraisal - Feel free to message me. I can give you pretty detailed review about your current website.
Thanks
Sami Ketolainen
