If you have a great plan for a business, and you’re not the type of person to slowly get started on new projects, you’ll want a website up fast so you can start growing your business. If you’ve never built one, this might seem impossible; especially if you are not the most comfortable person using computers. Don’t worry, help is at hand. There are multiple services online that will help you with your website after you do a little planning work first.
Refine Your Idea (but Just Enough)
Sometimes the fastest way to make progress is to get a slow start – not too slow, just slow enough to be sure of what you want. Spend some time planning what you think your website should be like. Worry first about how you want the site to work instead of how it looks, though it’s okay to spend some time dreaming about your design, too. But mostly you want to make sure you have an idea of what pieces you need to include for your site. If you determine that you’ll want a blog for talking about your services, or that you need to make sales directly on your site, those are pieces that you’ll need to make sure get included, and you can use them to evaluate your options further along in the process.
Find Your Platform
Once you have a general idea of what you want your site to be like, start looking for sites that offer free website creating and hosting. If you are sure you are going to want to step up to a paid level of service, you can try evaluating some of those services too, but a free website may get you going, depending on what pieces your website needs. There are many website makers online, each of which uses slightly different controls to help you design and construct your site, and which may offer slightly different features. Try out a few of them to get a feel for what works the best for you before you make a final decision. Having tools that you understand, and maybe even enjoy using, makes all of the subsequent work faster and easier.
Build and Test
Once you’ve decided on your site platform, get to work on building your site. Start with the most important feature first, and design the rest of the site to complement it. If you want to focus on the blog portion of your site, then make sure it displays the number of posts you want, how much of each post, and what kind of commenting and sharing features are enabled, for example. If the center of your site is an online store, make sure your products are showcased attractively, and in an organized, easy-to-navigate way.
One vital part of any kind of website creation is testing. You want to make sure that your site works the way you want and expect it to, before you release it to potential customers. View the site without being logged into your account with the site builder to see how it looks to someone else. Try it out on multiple machines and web browsers if you can. Once everything is working correctly, you’re ready to launch. Your website is in business.
