Remember the days when you had to pay someone to create a website? With many services these days, pretty much anyone can create a new website in under an hour. Now it takes almost zero technical background with tools like Wordpress, Ghost, Wiz, Squarespace etc.
This guide is brought to you by Site Guide Ninja, a cool team of dudes with more than 10 years of experience creating websites for a wide range of industries.
The name of your website is fairly important. You could be starting a new company, or have an existing brand that you need to be online. The most important characteristics are:
Unique - It needs to have a name that is unique, and thus "brandable". Don't use hyphens or numbers unless its part of the brand. It should be memorable and catchy.
Short - A short domain name means its easy to type. Easy to share. Not hard to spell.
Easy to say - When you chose the domain, think of the person on the other end of the phone. Can they easily spell it based on how you say it?
.com - We recommend you chose a dot-com address instead of .biz, .net, .blog etc -- not because there is any inherent advantage, but because most people are used to dot-com and will just add it to your name by default.
Trademarks - Do not make your name sound like another name. You could be sued.
Site Guide Ninja recommends you use Wordpress. Why? It's more flexible. Unlike the hosted systems like Wix & Squarespace, Wordpress allows you to expand as your grow.
You can add unlimited numbers of pages and easily change their styles as you wish.
There are plugins available to give your site unimaginable features as you think of them.
If you actually need help, then wordpress experts are easily available with great rates.
Site Guide Ninja recommends Siteground for wordpress hosting.
This might be the easiest part of the process, since most hosting providers offer a one-click method of doing this. Your Wordpress site can be up literally in a couple of minutes after buying your domain name. We won't spend too much time here, since this is so easy.
Read the details on how to install Wordpress in the super-detailed guide.
The theme (or style and appearance) of your website is something that is important because you want something that fits what your website will do and what your brand is.
By using your own Wordpress installation you have access to many, many themes that you can download and install. From free to premium paid themes. Just search the web for "Wordpress Theme" and you can find just the ones you like.
There are literally thousands of themes available online.
Don't spend days and days looking for themes, pick something that is close to what you want and get started. Too many times we can get frozen by indecision.
Finally, the biggest part of the job is adding content.
There are basically 2 types of content -- static like your "about us" page and dynamic like your blog posts.
Google recommends that you frequently add content to your site, so this is something that should be ongoing.
Make a schedule and stick to it. Example, put something up at least once per week. Again because Wordpress is so popular, most online writers know how to use it and you can hire someone to write content for you and just give them a login and password so they can log into your Wordpress and help you.
Wordpress even has basic statistics so you can see how popular your content is, and if you enable comments people can even leave comments as well.
You can install some kind of Analytics system like Google Analytics, or Simple Analytics. This will help you keep you abreast of how your site is doing.
Install some of the important plugins that help your site do better in SEO, speed it up, generate leads, ecommerce and literally thousands more.
And finally, to read the super-detailed version of this guide, go to Site Guide Ninja.