Where to begin? Before you start creating a website, you need to define clearly the reasons why you need it.
There are two main reasons:
- commercial;
- non-commercial.
How to use a site for commercial purposes?
- sale of goods and services;
- PR (public relations);
- transfer of valuable information to the target audience;
- creating a positive image for a company;
Speaking about non-commercial purposes, we can define charities, sites created for communication, exchange of various content, and information between certain groups of users.
Defining tasks before creating a website
- First of all, we should note that any well-designed site can solve a wide range of tasks. For instance:
- creating a flow of target visitors;
- organization of effective processing of orders from potential customers;
- increasing the personal brand of the creator of the site or recognition of the company;
- building trust from customers and potential customers;
- providing relevant information in the popular formats: text, images, as well as video and audio materials;
- providing website visitors with the opportunity to observe the file of interest to them: a price list, presentation of products;
- automation of business;
- and many others.
Have you already decide what tasks your site has to solve? This is important, because, on the basis of the tasks set, you can choose the type of site that is appropriate for your website.
Technical aspects of creating a site
The technical aspects of creating a website depend on the choice of the necessary tools. First of all, it is necessary to understand – today, there are three main ways to create a website:
- using site builders;
- using CMS systems;
- writing the source code.
Let’s look at two of these methods more detailed: site builders and CMS systems.
Website builders
In case you need a little site to publish some information or something like a portfolio, website builders might be suitable for you!
Here you can find the most effective and easy to use builders that allows creating a site without any coding, programming and web design knowledge.
The most popular website builders:
Wix is one of the most popular ones. It allows for creating a site quickly and easily. This platform comes with lots of advantages for a beginner. It provides an intuitive interface, a drag-and-drop building system, and attractive themes. It has pros, but it has cons as well. Also, it can have a negative influence on SEO. You can read more about its advantages and disadvantages in our article.
Nethouse. It is a constructor that is perfect for creating business card sites, portfolio sites, online stores. It is quite simple in primary development and further use.
UKit is a website builder that allows you to create modern sites, and then successfully deal with their SEO-promotion. It has an easy to learn and intuitive user interface and also includes an advanced analytics system.
You can also check our article “Top 8 Most Popular CMS Platforms for Blogging“.
Of course, creating a site is a creative process and you will regularly return to it and provide new features. These builders allow concentrating on the creation process. As a result, you get a website with a convenient mobile version and absolutely no technical knowledge.
But as far as your website grows bigger, a simple website builder won’t be enough for you. If you have created a website and now want to transfer it to a more powerful CMS – aisite is your solution! Try Free demo migration and check how all of the content and data can be migrated absolutely automatically!
CMS systems
The choice of a CMS system depends on the purpose of creating a specific site. Each engine for the site has its own characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages. In addition, it is worth considering that all CMS systems are divided into two large groups: free and paid engines.
Top free CMS systems
WordPress is great for creating blogs, business, and corporate sites. By the way, the site that you are reading now works on the basis of this particular CMS.
Pros:
complete control over your site
access to more than 55,000 free plugins
different awesome features every blogger would love: online store, paid membership, forum
SEO plugins and tools, which helps a lot
large community, which provides great support
Cons:
complete control means learning a lot of things
your security is your responsibility
Joomla is another multifunctional CMS-system that allows you to create a simple business card website or corporate website, as well as a full-fledged online store.
Pros:
it supports e-commerce
extremely easy to edit
advanced users & permissions management
Joomla Has Caching & Performance Mechanisms
Cons:
Joomla more complicated than WordPress
comparing to other CMSs, Joomla has less free extensions – around 8000
a poor variety of free templates
Drupal is another popular CMS-system, which is excellent for creating corporate sites, business card sites, as well as portfolio sites, social networks, and online stores.
Pros:
security is a major emphasis
flexible taxonomies and scalability
helpful community
Drupal has many modules already available
Cons:
you have to clear the cache every time you do anything
large learning curve
modules tend to be less friendly to one another than those for other systems
writing a GOOD custom module can be difficult
What is ‘Hosting’
You need to understand that all the sites that are available on the World Wide Web are located somewhere. More specifically, they (their files) are located on the hard drives of servers (powerful computers) at the disposal of hosting companies.
Since almost any site consists of different types of files (databases, texts, pictures, videos), access to them from different computers is carried out by processing a request addressed to the site, which is located on the server of the hosting company.
The cost of hosting can vary depending on how large and visited the exact site. The good news is that most sites do not require really expensive hosting.
How to choose a hosting
When choosing a hosting for the site being created, we recommend that you follow the following criteria:
Stable work. The hosting you choose should work stably 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Otherwise, you will suffer reputational losses in the eyes of visitors, as well as lose credibility on the part of search engines. In this regard, it is worth paying special attention to such a parameter as uptime hosting. Uptime is the time during which the site is operating normally and visitors can open it in their browser without any problems. It should be as close as possible to 100%. In turn, the response time of the site demonstrates how quickly your site responds to a request from the user’s browser. The shorter the response time, the better.
Simplicity and convenience of the user interface. Upon entering your personal account, the entire control panel should be not only accessible but also intuitive. In particular, you should see the current balance, as well as have quick access to all the basic hosting functions.
Service cost. This aspect is important both for beginner webmasters who have a limited budget at their disposal, as well as for owners of large-scale Internet projects that require the use of really expensive hosting.
I hope you found all the answers you were looking for! In case you already have a website and want to migrate it to a more powerful CMS platform – aisite gives you that chance! Try Free Demo Migration right now and breathe the new life into your website!
