Building a website is easier today than it has ever been, but this is not the same as saying it’s easy. There are many aspects of starting a website that can trip you up at first, and there’s no remedy like experience for this. when you’re first starting out, though, there are many important tips that a lot of website builders would have loved to have, so today we’re going to look at some top tips for starting your first website—as well as free tools that can help you do it.
Let’s get started.
- Hosting
One of the first things you’ll need to think about is web hosting. All websites need to be hosted by a service which takes care of storing and maintaining files and applications on their servers. This makes your website’s services available to viewers and customers at times. Choosing where to host is a big part of the process.
You can pay to have a service host your site, but there are also many free options. These are, naturally, often not to the same standard as paid services, but it’s a great way to get started. Services like InfinityFree boast 99.9% uptime figures, and offers many features like unlimited bandwidth and even free subdomains.
- Domain
Speaking of domains, this is another key part of starting your first website. To put it simply, your web domain is just the name of your website—it’s what users will type into their address bar or search engine to reach your site. Depending on what your site is for, this is one of the most vital parts of the process. You want something catchy and memorable which can also be incorporated into your brand.
Many services, such as Hostinger and Wix, offer free domain names with their website builders which can help you get started.
- Personalising and customising
Once you’ve got the basics down, now you’ll want to consider how you can personalise and customise your site. It’s vital that your site looks good to those who visit it, and that it has a memorable and recognisable image. Most website builders and web designers offer great options for customisation, and Squarespace is a great choice for getting the look of your site down without having to pay for it, at least right away.
- Backlinks
Finally, one of the best practices for helping retain users on your site is cultivating backlinks to other pages on your site. These will take the form of links in text or images which link to other relevant parts of your site. Backlinks are a great way to get users to engage with the site as a whole, rather than just the one page they happened upon.
So, these are the key things that you need to keep in mind when you’re looking to start your first website. With the variety of free servicecs available out there today, you’ll be fully supported at every stage of the process of starting your first website—so what are you waiting for?