How to build a basic DIY website for your business

Welcome to the first article in our “DIY website” series, in this series we hope to help you understand what is involved in building and further developing your own website for your business. This article is intended as a brief overview of how to build your own website for a small business, in subsequent articles we will go into further depth for more specialised topics, but for now we will just focus on getting you online.

The first thing we need to decide before building our website is why we are building our website. This may seem like the answer should be simple but is often the first pitfall that many people fall into, having a clear understanding of what the website should be achieving will help guide the rest of your choices. The answer to this question will require a little more detail than the common “I want a website to make more money”, we all want more money, but this statement alone will not help us produce real results in achieving that goal. The “Why” statement should be a specific outcome that will have a real-world impact on your business, you should be able to measure the results and it should be something that you can realistically achieve.

Here are a few examples of “Why” statements from some of the businesses we have helped in the past:

• A small café – “I want to be online so that people can find my café on Google maps”
• A plumbing business – “We need a website so that we can find new customers”
• A construction firm – “Our clients expect that legitimate firms will have a fancy website”
• An Instagram influencer – “I want to sell my merchandise without having to pay platform fees”

Each of these examples shows a different reason for wanting to be online, each of these statements is measurable for success, each will influence the design decisions in different ways and produce a different result.

The next step is creating a website layout plan, this is just a fancy way of saying that we are going to decide what webpages we will have and what we want on them. A good place to start is by writing down the core pages that are universal to almost every website, they are the “home” page, the “About” page and the “Contact” page. The “Home” page is generally the landing page of almost every website on the internet and serves as a sort of central location for users, this is where you will place your most important information. The “About” page is where you can place some information about what your business is and how it came to be, this is a good spot to write some feel-good stuff about your firm. The “Contact” page serves the simple purpose of giving your visitors a method to contact you, as a general rule of thumb the contact page is designed for non-purchase questions as you will typically have more specialised contact forms for purchasing users.

Next you will need to decide if you need any additional pages and what purpose each of these will fulfill. Using the cases from before we will give you some examples that each of those firms required:

• The small café also added a page for their menu which included a booking form.
• The plumbing business required a “Services” page that outlined what services they offered and included a quote form.
• The construction firm needed their website to include a range of pages that outlined their corporate policies and values.
• The Instagram influencer required pages to display her products both individually and collectively.

Now that we have decided what pages we will have on our website; we must decide on the content. When deciding the details of any given page, it is up to you to determine how much detail you want to go into to, it can be as simple as a few bullet points or as in-depth as a detailed drawing mocking up all the elements.

This is very commonly a step that we find a lot of people try to skip and complete instead when they are building out the website, that is a really bad idea as it creates a larger job during the building stage which will lead you to procrastination, it is a far better idea to have each step broken down as much as possible to prevent any step from feeling unobtainable.

Now that we have got our plan, we can start building up some content for our website. The more detail that you put into your layout plan, the easier it will be to know what content you need here. It is important to remember to properly label and organise your content for later use, if you cannot find your content then you cannot use it. As a rule of thumb there are only a few basic content types that you will need for your website, in particular:

• Images
• Written text
• Forms

Starting with images we will want to use each image to communicate something to the user, images when used well will do this subtly. Begin by deciding what we want each image to communicate, this will be dependent on what the context around the image is. The café may want on their home page to show a cosy looking store filled with happy customers drinking coffee, the construction firm may choose images that portray men in suits pointing to a construction plan. Next we will need to obtain images that suit our purposes, you can choose to use pictures that you take yourself or you can choose from stock images. We use Shutterstock for our images and would recommend them as a good option, they can be expensive, but they do offer a great range of good quality images.

Writing text for your website might seem like the easiest task, but for most people this is quite difficult. Personally, I have always found it easier to write once I have clarified what topic any given paragraph needs to be about.  I begin by writing down all my headlines, one for each paragraph, then I start filling out the paragraphs, adding or removing headings as my writing begins to take shape and I better develop an idea of what I want to write. There is a whole field of expertise that deals specifically with writing content for the internet and how to best leverage content to maximise traffic, but I would recommend ignoring that completely for the first iteration of your website.  It is better to just write something and get started rather than getting bogged down in trying to make it perfect. You can find some writing pointers on this blog 11 golden rules of writing website content.

When it comes to preparing your forms, the main thing you need to decide upon is what information you will require from your users. For simple contact forms it might just be a name, an email address, and a short comment from the user. You may decide however that you need something a little more specialised, such as a booking form, where you will need additional details such as the booking date and time. The key is making sure that you collect any details that are relevant while ensuring that you do not collect more details than you will need.  Asking your users for more details than are realistically needed may dissuade them from completing the forms.

Deciding upon a hosting company can be very overwhelming for most people when building a website for the first time, if you do not have any technical expertise then you might not understand the differences between each company’s offer. We have found that when most new users pick their hosting company, they expend a bit of energy trying to look around and see what is good briefly before giving up and picking the company that has the most recognisable name.   For your first website this is probably fine, you can always change later if you need something better down the road. Rather than focusing on the differences between companies, we recommend firstly looking at which kind of tool set you will require. Deciding which kind of tool you need depends on how much time and effort you want to put in. The most basic website building tools will give you the ability to build your website quickly and with minimal learning, while the more advanced tools will give you greater control and flexibility but will require you to learn how to use them. Broadly these tools can be split up into the following categories:

• DIY website builders
• Managed WordPress sites
• cPanel websites

DIY website builders are the most basic and easy to use option, generally featuring a drag and drop interface, if you have properly prepared your content in advance, you can build a website in under an hour. This is the option that we recommend for all first-time builders, it will get your website online very quickly and generally feel quite intuitive.

For users that have a little more knowledge on how to build websites and are ready to try something slightly more complex, we have the managed WordPress option. WordPress is a great platform for intermediate users, it still has a range of easy-to-use systems but integrates them with user written coding. A major benefit of using WordPress is the sheer number of developers that build toolsets for the platform, of course most of these do come with a larger price tag. The flip side of this though is that it can be difficult to wade through so many tools to find the one that is best suited for your needs.

Lastly, we have the cPanel option, this is the most complex option available and is generally only picked by larger companies that have a dedicated developer. cPanel gives you direct access to the hosting server, from here you can upload whatever code you would like, naturally this also means that you will have to write all the code yourself. This is a good option for firms that have an extremely specific need that the other options would be unable to fulfill, with no barriers you have the power to build anything.

Once you have picked which type of toolset you will be using, you can now focus on comparing hosting companies. Unfortunately, there is not any easy way to quickly determine which hosting service is best, you will have to compare each on what they include and figure out which is the best value for you. Of course, we would like to remind you that we are a hosting company and we are very proud of our products, we are somewhat biased here but we think our offer is the best available SwanHosting

Now that we have our hosting setup, and we have our content ready to go, it is time to begin building your website. It might be worthwhile spending some time familiarising yourself with the toolset that you have selected, spend some time playing with some of the elements that you can use. When you are ready, simply follow the plan that you have been building as you have been going through this guide.  Pick the first page that you have in your website layout plan and insert the content that you have prepared. Once you have built all your pages you can begin styling your website, this means changing things such as colours, fonts, and the general feel of your website now that you have an immediate visual display of any changes that you make.

Now that you have built your website, we have a short list of things you should check off.

• Check for typing mistakes in all contact details, there is nothing worse than finding out customers were given the wrong number.
• View your website on all your devices, websites can look and feel quite different on different devices.
• Show your website to some friends, they will find mistakes that you did not know you made.

Your website should now be fully built and ready to go, congratulations on building your first website.