How do I build a website? Well, what kind of website?

How to build a website is quite a common question asked but is not the easiest answer to give as there are many different ways you can build a website. The real question that has to be asked before the initial one can be answered is, what kind of website do you want to build?

There are many a category of website that exists in today’s world, you have Ecommerce, Text Blogs, Video Blogs, Informational websites, Web Apps, and more. The type of website you are looking to build will easily narrow down your options in terms of what technologies are best suited for your website.

In this article, we’ll list a few questions or sort of checklist that you can ask yourself to help you determine how you should go about building a website.

1. How badly do I want this?

Before anything, this is something you should really ask yourself first because building and owning a website is no simple job. If you think it’s a quick way to make money unfortunately you’re quite mistaken and definitely looking in the wrong place.

Having a digital footprint in this society has become a must for businesses and seemingly so as well for individuals. The interest and the excitement is there but one thing that saddens us is the follow-through and dedication at times. Sometimes we build a website for a client and after a year of being online, they decide to not renew their domain name and just give up.

Just being present on the internet is not enough, getting visibility takes effort and an extreme amount of hard work.

So if you’re thinking about starting your own website, take a second to ask yourself am I willing to put in the work?

2. Am I ready to make an investment?

With the vast amount of free website platforms available for anyone with no prior technical experience to be able to build websites, it can be a little misleading regarding the actual cost of a website. The truth is building a website and maintaining that website are two separate costs.

Once your website is built you’ll have some sort of fees attached to it monthly or if you’re lucky on a yearly basis. A few of the costs that clients might not be aware of are:

Monthly Hosting
CDN
Website maintenance
Domain renewal (yearly)
SSL renewal (yearly)
Advertising
Integrated tools (Mailchimp, Hubstop, Converkit)

Your most costly will probably be hosting depending on the type of website you’ve built or your maintenance costs if you’re paying for a website management service as we offer.

3. What kind of website do I need?

Probably one of the most important points obviously but as a developer, something that’s going to impact the client outside of the development of the website is hosting.

For those who have no clue what hosting is, hosting is simply the home for your website’s files on the internet (It’s a little more than that but just the basics). There are a few types of hosting available but we’ll quickly cover Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting, two of the most common.

Shared hosting is exactly what it is, your website is sharing a home with thousands of other websites on your hosting companies’ servers. Each website is allotted a specific amount of resources like storage space, RAM, etc. If you go over these limits your website will either completely shut down or become significantly slower. So for example if you make a post on Facebook directing your 5,000 fans to your website, if even 1000 of them try to visit the website all at once, there’s a big chance your server won’t be able to handle all those requests and your website will time out.

With VPS Hosting, you’re not sharing a server with anyone, your hosting company has your website on its own server with significantly higher limits allotted and lightning-fast speeds but all this comes at an extremely high cost for someone just starting out and not making money from the website.

Going with the same scenario as we used in the previous example, your VPS (server depending on your setup) would more than likely be able to handle those requests without timing out your website.

So, the type of website your building is something to really pin down on as it may significantly impact your monthly hosting fee. We can’t blame clients who are unaware of these things when they come to us which is why we try to help them make a more educated decision before getting started.

4. How will I promote my website?

This is a common occurrence that clients don’t always think deep enough about as it’s really the backbone of their existence. Often the thought is that just posting on social media is enough to drive traffic to your website, the reality is sometimes that doesn’t even work. The internet grows so fast that sometimes the techniques that worked last month may not work this month.

That being said, promotion shouldn’t discourage you but encourage you to step up a get a proper plan in order. Promoting a website in this era is almost 90% a monetary game but thats not to say it’s impossible for those without the resources, it will just going to require a lot more work.

For those who are fortunate to have a budget, don’t think you are in the clear and it’s a green light from here. Albeit promoting a website is monetary game, what’s the value of anything to you if you don’t know how to use it? You could have an unlimited ad budget to make yourself visible on all the top platforms but if you have no plan in place nothing will happen. As they say Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.

Still with me? Great if your looking to build a website for your brand or business, how does this make you feel? Does it change your mind or give you a clearer idea of what to expect going forward?