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Let’s Get That Website Online!
Who This Page Is For
First Steps
Step One: Domain Name
There are some guidelines for a good domain name, but if the name you want is already taken, there are some tricks to still get what you want! Try to pick something that is easy for people to remember and spell.
You may not know whether your name is taken until you search for it, which you can do here.
Recommendation: choose your name, your business name or the name of the product or service if you only have one.
Step Two: Platform
By far the most simple and affordable platform for this purpose is WordPress, which is our recommended platform. Side note: there are two forms of WordPress and for a business you need WordPress.org not WordPress.com.
Of course, you can choose another route. While you may get what looks to be a real bargain initially, the big downside of choosing one of those platforms though is that your website is not ‘portable’. This means if you want to keep your website content and all the ‘authority points’ you gain within search engines (which affects your ranking in search results) you can NEVER move your website from where it’s first set up. So either you have to put up with whatever fees they want to charge you for hosting or you lose everything and start again!
This isn’t the case with WordPress. Once your site is built, if you don’t like the hosting you have (the most common reasons are poor service and support or extortionate price hikes), you can move your website to another hosting and you won’t lose anything! At Get That Website Online, we regularly undertake transfer work for new clients who are fed up with ‘hidden’ additional fees.
Recommendation: choose WordPress as your platform.
Step Three: Hosting Service
There are some key points to think about when choosing your hosting, so let’s assume you’ve taken our recommendation to go with WordPress as your platform.
Ideally you want a hosting service that provides servers (the machines that store your website and show it when someone goes to it) that are optimised for your chosen platform. While it’s technically possible to host a WordPress site on any hosting service, optimisation means the servers are specifically designed to deliver WordPress based sites, so they’ll be quicker.
You also want to consider whether the servers operate with ‘shared-load’ functionality. This means that your website speed will never be compromised by too many other websites being stored on the same server. The cheapest options invariably cram websites in like sardines (because that’s cheapest for them), but your website is much more vulnerable to poor speeds and malware attacks.
Finally, think about what extras you get with your hosting as part of the service. At Get That Website Online, we include daily malware scanning, daily site back ups, a security certificate, anti-spam software and email address all within the fee for our optimised WordPress shared-load hosting. Many hosting services will charge you separately for these things, so be careful of added extras that make a cheap offer way more expensive!
Recommendation: find hosting that offers a good deal up front, that is optimised for your website platform and doesn’t have hidden extras to add to your monthly bill. Naturally we recommend our hosting services, which are only £11 + VAT per month all in!
Step Four: Let's Start Building!
A) Connect your domain to your hosting. This is done by ‘pointing’ your ‘nameservers‘ at your hosting. With reputable domain suppliers, this will be obvious from your administration login (where you bought the domain from, you should get login details for this). The nameservers are simply the address your website will be stored at. All you’re doing is helping the internet connect your domain name and your location.
B) After your nameservers are set up to tell the internet where to send visitors, you can install a basic WordPress starter-site through your hosting. This will give you a second set of login details, which means you can access the WordPress dashboard for your site. It comes with a few pages and posts pre-loaded, so you’re not starting from absolute zero, but it’s not far from that!
C) Now you have your basic WordPress site installed, you can start styling it and adding content. You’ll probably want to think about how many pages you want straight away. You don’t have to have everything finished at once! WordPress is designed to be added to over time, so if you only need a front (home) page and one or two others, this is fine to start with.
D) While you’re building, consider having a ‘coming soon’ page, which acts as a temporary Home Page while you’re building in the background. Include your email address for people to contact you while this is going on. This page is simply a new page that is very plain with no links or styling on it other than your email address and a ‘coming soon’ notice. It can be helpful to have a ‘launch date’ mentioned – keeps you on track and focussed!
Recommendation: if you have an uneasy relationship with tech, find a good host that will set this up for you. Of course we’d be delighted to be your partner in this at Get That Website Online!
Step Five: Don't Forget Emails
You may have already built a business around a free email address and you can keep that going if you want to. If you choose a hosting option that comes with email addresses for free though, why wouldn’t you use that? You can always have your emails redirected to your other account, but we’d recommend starting to use a professional address as soon as you can.
You can also have more than one address, which helps keep things tidy. For example, you might want a more generic address to show on your website and then a personal address (with your name) reserved for specific conversations.
A good hosting provider will also give you easy options for how emails are stored and delivered. Addresses provided through a hosting service for free can be all you need, but if you wanted added security around storage and access, you could also have them routed through a paid service such as Google Workspace or Microsoft Exchange. Make sure if you take the paid option that your hosting provider can easily switch those settings for you, or make it easy for you to do yourself. You will be going into what’s called the DNS settings for your domain and while this can be easy in some cases, you will need a bit more tech knowhow.
Recommendation: Create at least one professional email address to begin with and then as more if needed as your business grows. If you don’t want to use your name, use something like “hello@” or “contact@”
Step Six: Branding & Styling
If you’re already sorted for this, bear in mind that most good website design will need to have one or two main colours (dark enough that they can be seen easily on a white or light background) plus an ‘accent colour’ to be used for links and other bits you might want to highlight. In addition, you can use white where appropriate and if you want to use a black, don’t go for true black, but more of a dark charcoal. This is easier on the eye of your visitors!
On Get That Website Online for example, we use a dark blue (which carries across all the sub-brands of The Get That Gang) and a turquoise, plus bright pink for accents.
You will also need to think about what sort of imagery you want to use: photos, objects, people, graphics, illustrations, videos. You don’t need all the answers immediately, but a good starting point can be looking at competitor sites and working out what you do and don’t like!
Another option is to choose a ‘Theme’ for your website – free or paid – that will take some of the styling options away (reducing overwhelm) and make it easier to apply your branding by default. WordPress comes with a set of Themes to choose from initially, but many people favour finding something they prefer either in the free options out there or increasingly with a ‘drag and drop’ builder (where you literally drag and drop blocks of content into place) such as Divi or Elementor. At Get That Website Online we mainly use Divi and we have clients we work with on Elementor too. Both of these are premium Themes, and make website building far easier.
Finally, don’t forget mobile! More than half of websites are viewed on a mobile device these days, so your site might look great on a desktop or laptop, but be a bit wonky or even unreadable on mobile. Luckily, Premium Themes give you great options for checking things as you’re building.
Recommendation: don’t overthink this area – start with where you are and invest in basic branding if you need it. You can always change things around after! Consider using a premium theme for your website which makes design and build much easier and don’t forget the mobile view.
Step Seven: Your Home Page
Generally you want to produce something that makes it nice and easy for people to work out if they’re in the right place. No-one wants to invest time in reading a whole load of text only to find it’s not what they thought. So a nice big headline announcing what the website’s about, along with sections explaining the different questions they might have. Remember to give people an action to take such as getting in touch with you.
We have some recommendations for what to have on your Home Page but as long as you feel it makes the right first impression that you want people to have, eveyrthing else is just detail!
If you choose to have a website supplied by Get That Website Online of course, we’ll do all that thinking for you.
Recommendation: another area to avoid overthinking; make sure the first thing seen tells people whether or not they’re in the right place and give them guidance as to what action to take.
Step Eight: SEO & Analytics
To begin with though, you just need to get the basics right: always complete your ‘meta’ information (the stuff that the search engines ‘read’ to determine what your site’s about), make sure your images have ‘Alt Text’ (a description for screen-readers and other accessibility tools), and make sure every page has a ‘featured image’ (one that shows on social media when you type the website address in).
To make life much easier, WordPress offers a number of ‘plugins‘ that you can use to complete the required information. Plugins literally ‘plug in’ to your WordPress website and add new functionality, expanding what you can do. You can get SEO plugins such as Yoast, RankMath or AIOSEO (All In One SEO).
If you are expecting a higher volume of traffic (especially important if you’re intending to drive traffic to your website), you will want to consider adding in analytics capability. This, though, is not for those who don’t have the best relationship with tech, as Google Analytics is not very user friendly!
Recommendation: Make sure you get your basic SEO set up and then if you think you’ll be driving lots of traffic to your site, then get some analytics installed. If you need any help with either, then add it to your Pick ‘n’ Mix!
Step Nine: Publish & Promote!
Many people want to get some honest feedback from colleagues and friends to begin with, just to spot anything that’s not working properly or looks a bit weird. If you’d rather have a professional review with tips for improvements, consider our Website Review service.
For promoting your site, make sure the URL (the website address i.e. mybrilliantwebsite,com) is anywhere you can put it! Social Media, at the bottom of your emails – anywhere someone might expect to find it. There are additional strategies for driving traffic to your site, which you can consider once you’re happy the site is a good representation of what you want.
Recommendation: once you’re happy with your site’s first iteration, make sure you let everyone know about it and include a link to it in all your emails.
What’s Next?
