Introduction
If you’re new to the world of website development and want to build a blog or other type of site, this guide is for you. We’ll take you through the steps of creating your initial website, from registering your domain name to building it out and optimising it for search engines.
Domains, Hosting, and Creating Your Website
You need to understand some basic terms in order to get started. A domain name is the address of your website, and hosting refers to the space on a web server where your files are stored. A website is what you see when you visit a domain name—it’s essentially just a bunch of files stored on a server that can be accessed over the internet. You don’t have to know how all this stuff works, but if you want people to find your website (and therefore buy from it), then it’s good for them—and possible for them—to do so.
Building Your Website
The first thing you need to do before building a website is choose a web hosting plan. This is the service that will host your website on the Internet, allowing people to find it via their browsers and view it in real time. There are two main types of web hosting: shared and dedicated. If you’re just starting out, you’ll probably want to choose shared hosting since it’s less expensive—but be aware that with this type of plan, there are limits on how many websites can be hosted off one physical server at once; if another site on your server becomes very popular (and uses up the available resources), then your site could go down in response.
The next step is choosing a domain name for your website—this will be used as part of its URL (e.g., www.examplewebsite.com). If possible, try not to use hyphens or underscores (_) in these names because they may cause problems when trying to register them later with some search engines like Google; instead use only lowercase letters without punctuation except for periods (.), which are fine because they won’t interfere with how URLs work anyway! Also remember not put any unusual characters like “&” into these names because some browsers might not recognize these special characters correctly when trying accessing them through certain channels like email clients.”
Making Your Site Mobile-Friendly
Making your site mobile-friendly is important because more and more people are using their phones to browse the internet. In fact, according to Statista, mobile devices accounted for 55% of all web traffic worldwide in June 2017. And if you’re not making your site mobile-friendly, then you could be losing out on a lot of potential customers.
Thankfully, it’s easy to make your site mobile-friendly—and it doesn’t take a lot of time or money either! There are two main options: free or paid (paid plans start around $99/month).
The easiest way to test whether or not your website is already mobile-friendly is simply by opening it on your phone and checking out how it looks; if there’s nothing wrong with what you see on that small screen then congratulations! Your site can go ahead and claim its spot among the ranks of those who have made their sites accessible for all users regardless of what device they use. If there are problems though—say when trying to navigate through content like text articles—then consider switching over from one plan over another until everything looks right again (or maybe consider hiring someone else instead!).
Optimizing for Search Engines
Optimizing your website for search engines is a great way to get organic traffic, which is the most valuable type of traffic you can get. This means that this kind of optimization isn’t about manipulating Google or other search engines into giving you more page rankings, but instead, it’s about making sure that the content on your site will be picked up by them in their natural crawling process.
There are various things you can do to successfully optimize your website for crawlers:
- Use keywords in the title and description tags of each page on your site (e.g., “website development guide”).
- Use keywords as often as possible in relevant places such as URLs (e.g., www.websitedevguide.com), alt text (alt=”website development guide”) and meta descriptions (meta name=”description” content=”Website Development Guide”). You should also use relevant words within internal links on pages throughout your site so they’re ranked higher by Google when someone searches those particular phrases/words or even partial matches to those phrases/words.*
Driving Traffic to Your Blog
Let’s talk about driving traffic to your blog. There are many ways to do this, and we’ll look at the most effective ones.
- Use SEO (search engine optimization) techniques. These can be used by themselves or in conjunction with other methods. For example, if you’re using social media to drive traffic, you should optimize your posts for search engines as well so that it’s easier for people who find your content from Google or other search engines to discover and engage with it. You want every piece of content on your website—including pages that don’t exist yet—to be optimized for search engines so that all of them show up when people search for relevant keywords or topics in Google or another search engine of choice (such as Bing). Optimizing each page individually takes time but is worth doing if you want to get the most out of each post and increase its overall reach.
- Use social media effectively. This includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest etc., which are all platforms where users spend a lot of time browsing through posts created by brands/businesses they follow or might like based on their interests; they may even follow some companies just because they’re interested in what these businesses have been posting lately! The main idea here is not just getting followers/fans but rather creating meaningful connections with them by being consistent with posting quality materials about things related directly towards topics covered within respective pages hosted under same domain name; this makes sure folks who visit often enough see fresh stuff every time instead having something stale whenever they browse through old posts since there wasn’t any activity since long ago until now–which would usually lead towards losing interest quickly due lack thereof before finding anything else interesting elsewhere online..
Marketing Your Blog
Marketing is a process. It’s not something you can do once and be done with it. You need to have a plan for your blog, and that plan needs to be constantly updated as things change in your niche or the industry at large. To start this process, you need to know who your audience is (and isn’t), what their goals are, what resources you have available to work with, how much time and money you’re willing/able to spend on marketing activities, how competitive the niche is and any other factors that might affect how effective your tactics will be.
This guide gives you the basic steps for starting your website development journey.
Before you start, it’s important to understand that website development is a process.
- It takes time and effort.
- You can’t skip any steps in the process, or else your website will be less than perfect.
- You need to do your research on what works and what doesn’t work for different types of websites.
Conclusion
If you’re just getting started with website development, then this guide is for you! We hope that it has given you some insight into how important it is to have a mobile-friendly website, how to drive traffic to your blog and how marketing can help boost your site. If you need more information on any of these topics, feel free to reach out so we can help answer any questions or concerns.