Alright, let me guess… you’re here because you want to create a site for your brand and well, now you’re stuck with that thought because you’re not a programmer yourself. Am I right?
Great news! This little guide here, intends to direct users with only the basic knowledge, and help them achieve a great brand website by the end of it. Again, HTML knowledge isn’t required. Okay then, let the journey to your website begin!
The Things You’ll Need To Create a Free Website
Domain Name
Let’s think for a minute you’re a shoes trader and would like to get a site that says it all either about your brand or your product. For that, you have to get a domain name registered. To get it, you’ll have to pay an annual amount to the registrar. That will give you the rights to use that name for your site, e.g. mybrandedshoes.com
Before you move on to the next point, know that you will need to have a mode of payment like credit card and most important of all, go for brand name or pick the name that best describes your business.
Sorry for bringing it up late, but if you find it complex, there is an alternative. A free website builder. What-you-see-is-what-you-get website creators like Wix, glu7 and Square Space also feature paid subscription which includes domain, hosting (more on it in the next section) and the costs of domain and domain hosting along with convenient designing options.
Web Hosting
Your site is going to be registered against an email ID, so you practically cannot get yourself a domain without a web host which will offer you room to host your site. Web hosting services are offered by companies that owns thousands of computers which host the data and grant users access to that data by hosting it on World Wide Web. Think of it as a place you’d have rented to store items and accessories in case of a brick and mortar store.
Amazon Web hosting Services or AWS, is a great place to start looking for a domain. Alternatively, create a free website via a website creation tool, say,
glu7,
Wix or
Weebly, the hosting services are going to be part of the parcel. Once you have acquired domain hosting, you will have to point the domain towards that account. This is called domain pointing. In case of a paid package from glu7, you can just use the settings tab to point the domain. Piece of cake.
Designing
I’ll say it again, you really don’t need any skills in development. If you are using any website maker, you can use the interface – which in most cases, is pretty simple to use – to add elements, images, objects and text boxes to create a page and make more using the same approach.
glu7, for instance, lets you drag and drop elements from the menu bar which essentially removes the need for a professional designer.
But if you want to go for custom development, you can just skip this skip and hire a professional designer to make your site. Of course the charges are going to be way more compared to a WYSIWYG website editor. The safest way to play it is to try out free plans of website creators like glu7, Wix, Weebly and Square Space. Since they’re free, you can always test them out and see if they can get the job done before you spend big bucks on custom development. So the better option for you will be to
create a free website on your own.
Bonus Step
You are probably staring at your site right now if you opted for these builders. Your site is already complete and ready to go live but before you do, know that there is one hidden aspect that can aid your objective of building a website, presence and leads. This step includes integrating Google Webmasters and Analytics into your website for added visibility and thus, better chances of gaining leads.
If you went with a website builder, you’d be happy to know that these tools also have built-in support for Google Analytics and Google Webmasters integration, so there’s another reason why for as low as $4.99, you can get a suitable domain, renowned Amazon hosting, all the tools to create a free website yourself and all of the necessary SEO-tools in one place.
