Step-by-step Guide to Building a Website

For the past few months, the main focus of most of our articles is about different Digital Marketing tactics. So we have previously brushed on the topics of creating websites and building your own web pages online. Therefore, in today’s article, we will provide a step-by-step guide to create a website.

This guide will help you understand the process of making a website from the client’s perspective. First and foremost, it is important to know that there are different approaches to do this.

Additionally, there are a lot of services nowadays that help you build a website through an automated process. However, the use of an automated service does have pros and cons. The process we will discuss today is known as the waterfall process. It makes it easier for you to make websites as one step easily follows the other.

The waterfall process falls in contrast with other faster processes, but it does provide clients as much control and upfront clarity on the deliverables and timelines. Therefore, all of the upsides of this process is exactly what a client needs.

Step-By-Step Guide To Building a Website

Step 1: Planning & Researching

Every project starts with planning and researching. When it comes to building a website, there are a few things you need to research and understand intensively during your planning process. They are listed below:

Target market – who will your customers and audience be?
Users
Competitors
Business

For those who already have an existing website and are just looking to improve the overall experience for users, you can always use the existing web analytics. So that the data from these analytics will help you understand if you are meeting your user’s needs.

Moreover, in the research process, there are a few key questions you need to ask. Check them out below:

What are your business objectives?
Which platform should you use?
Who are your users?
Who are your potential customers?
What type of service can you provide for your users?
What actions and tasks do users need to do on your website?

Answering the questions above will help you plan your website strategically. The planning process will help ensure that your services are in line with both the user needs and business objectives.

Step 2: Choosing a Domain Name

You may think that choosing a domain name is easy, but it can be a little bit tricky. Every day, there are thousands of new startup businesses that great domain names are becoming less available.

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A domain name is a part of the URL of a website. Here are a few things you should know about domain names:

Domains are the registered domain name of the website
A subdomain is a part of the larger domain
TLD or the top-level domain is the uppermost in the hierarchy of domain names, it is usually an indicator of which country the domain is registered. It can also give information about the domain’s nature.
The directory is a folder to organize the content.

When you go into a website, you can see this pattern at the URL field:

subdomain.domain.tld/directory or to translate, it can be www.mycompanydomain.com/home

Uses of TLD

The most common TLD is .com, but there are also other TLDs such as .co.uk, .com.au, .co.ca, co.za, which gives the country information. .Orgs TLDs are usually used by non-profit organizations while .gov or used by government websites. On the other hand, academic institutions such as college websites use .ac as their TLD.

Domain names must be registered. There is a fee to register domains, and there are a lot of different hosting providers who can register your domains on your behalf. There are a few important things that you must remember when choosing a domain name.

First, you do not want to use a forgettable or difficult domain name as you want people to easily search for your website. It is also important to include vital search keywords for your business.

For instance, you want to build a website for an eCommerce store, you want your domain name to be the name of your store, but you also can include the word “store” on your domain because it is an important search keyword.

Step 3: Creating the UX or User Experience & Content Strategy

This step is explained in detail in our article Step-by-Step Guide to UX Design. And so, you will need to gather, analyze and map out the entire content and experience your users will go through when they visit your website.

Every content and design of your website should be mapped or sketched out using wireframes. After this, the initial sketch should be reviewed by everyone involved in the web design and development project.

It will also undergo a series of testing and trials and errors. This is also the time to plan your website’s content. Depending on your website, you will need different content. Static content is the ones you can find on your homepage, your “about us” page, “contact us page.” There will also be content that you need to update regularly such as blog posts, product information, images, and etc.

Step 4: Search Engine Visibility

This is one of the most important steps when it comes to creating a website. After all, high search engine traffic is every marketer’s goal. Without search engine traffic, a website will never fulfill its marketing functions.

Hence, it is absolutely important for search engines to see the entire publicly visible website. With this, search engines will be able to index the site fully and consider it relevant for its chosen keywords.

This is where SEO or Search Engine Optimisation comes in. This is explained in detail in our article, Writing for Digital.

Step 5: Design

After the development of the website, comes the design process. You may hire a web developer or web designer to transform the wireframes mentioned earlier into a beautifully designed layout.

Step 6: Development

Once the design is finished, the development phase starts. This is where web developers start to use the approved design templates and codes the actual website. Most of the time, developers use front-end programming languages chosen by the client.

Step 7: Testing and Launch

Once everything is set, you want to test the websites first before launching. This is a very important step in the process. The testing phase includes quality assurance testing to ensure everything works properly and just the way you want to.

Test subjects should be customers and potential users of the website. They can often detect things that the development team may have overlooked.

That’s it for this guide. Do you have any additional information to suggest? Comment them down below!