What to Do When You ‘Got It Alone’ with Your Business Website

There are plenty of people out there with affordable web design services, but with the amount of tools out there to help those with no web design skills or experience create their own websites code free, developing your business website yourself is also always an option. If you are trying to start a business with very little money, then creating your site yourself is a very easy way to save. But how do you get started?

Choose the Right CMS

A CMS, or ‘content management system’, is the platform that you use as a website owner to manage all of the content on your site. Blog posts, static pages like your contact and ‘About’ pages, images, videos and product descriptions are just some of the types of content you might have, and you may also want to allow other people rights to add and edit things. You therefore want to choose a CMS Script you like using, and which is well suited to your needs.

Many people go with WordPress for business sites or blogs, but there are also CMS platforms designed for specific purposes, like Magento for ecommerce stores. Do some research, and when you have chosen your CMS, familiarise yourself with its back end interface (where you will be customising the site and adding content). Whatever you choose, you should be able to find plenty of tutorials and advice online to help you quickly become confident in managing your website.

Choose a Good Theme

Once you know which CMS you are going to use, you can choose a theme. This will give you a template you can build your site on, allowing you to customise it with your own colours, branding and other features. A theme will allow you to get a professional look and great functionality without having to know things like CSS and HTML. There are many themes that are free, but it can also be worth investing in a premium one if it is perfect for your business – it will still cost less than professional web design. Find a theme that works well with the type of content you expect to be posting. Some themes are great for blogs or magazine style sites with lots of articles, others for business sites that are mostly made up of static pages, and others again for sites where most of the content is images or other media.

Hosting and Domain

Once you have your CMS and theme, all that is left to get your site live is a domain, which will be where your site ‘lives’ on the web (for example ‘mysite.com’), and hosting. You can either get these together from the same provider, or buy your domain and give it to your chosen host. You have a lot of options when it comes to hosting, though for most purposes cloud VPS hosting is a good place to start – find out more about hosting here.

With your CMS, theme and a domain and host, all that is left is to put some great content on your site and start promoting it to the world!