Website Development 101: A Short Introduction
Whether you are a personal blogger or an ecommerce website, now is the best time to create a website. At this day and age, improving your online presence means generating success online and offline. But, can you really create your own website? What if you can’t afford to hire a professional, and experienced web design company? Feel free to experiment, research and explore around. There is no single formula in building engaging web pages, so you need to find the approach that will satisfy your unique goals.
Do you want to come up with a simple, basic website as soon as possible? Here are the first three steps you need to go through.
Define the details before finalizing the design.
As a newbie, you need to do tons of research. Alongside that, you need to ask yourself a lot of questions. By defining the details, we mean making a list of the elements and features you want to incorporate in your future website.
What is your website’s purpose?
What kinds of results do you want to generate? Do you want to sell products, provide services or blog? What do you want to achieve? Whatever the answer to these questions are, you need to share compelling, engaging content to your target audience.
Define your target audience.
Keep in mind that targeting a specific set of people is essential. You can’t just target everyone who is surfing the internet. Be more specific. Below are some of the important points you should take into account when defining your target audience.
A good audience persona should cover the following information:
- When
- Where
- Why
- Who
- What
- Employer
- Location
- Income
- Needs
- Pain points
- Challenges
- Gender
- Personality
- Family life
- Job title
- Job function
What can this set of people do to fulfill the objective of your website?
How can you segment out your potential target audience much further?
Can you segment your potential target audience by average annual revenue?
Are there certain characteristics and demographics which are more critical than others?
Finalize your website’s structure.
The next thing you need to address is your website’s skeleton. Usually, a website is divided into different subsections and sections. Website portions like these can give a user a good overview of your website. Utilize an outliner tool in order to create a better structure for your pages.
Prototype your website.
Website prototyping can be accomplished for you by a professional website developer. A website prototype website is a completely functional one containing all the important content. But, what if you are building your website all by yourself through a reliable website builder? In that case, all you need to do is explore around. Here are three popular website building platforms that will make your newbie developer life a lot easier.
WordPress.
This is a reliable, popular website building platform that is being used by 28% of all the websites in the digital landscape. Do you want 100% control over your pages? You can use WordPress to create any type of website you want.
Wix.
This is another quality, cloud-based web builder. It provides powerful features that will make your newbie life much easier. One of the best things about it? It is a fully-hosted platform. That means you don’t need to pay anything for hosting.
BigCommerce.
If you are creating an online store, BigCommerce is the way to go. It comes with a vast range of features–you wouldn’t need to worry about updates, security and speed.
