WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A WEBSITE BUILDER...
Do They Offer A Free Domain Name?
One of the reasons you have decided or are considering creating a website for
yourself is cost, right? And because you have little idea on how to create or
design this website you want the website builder company to make it as easy as
possible for you to be able to launch or publish your online presence. This is
why, when you are looking for an easy to use website builder, you make sure that
they offer a free domain name with your website builder package. A domain name
can be just as hard to purchase and setup as a website if you do not know what
you are doing so being able to combine the two and have a domain name included
in your website builder package makes the process less complicated and gives you
one less thing to worry about.
Does It Come With Web Hosting Included?
This step of the process is crucial, if your website builder does not come
with web hosting or is not a hosted website builder then you might as well
create a website from scratch as after you have created the website, you will
then need to purchase hosting, configure your website settings, upload all web
page files and then publish your website after that. This is a time consuming
process and once again will make the process very difficult if you do not have
an understanding of web hosting or how to upload files to a server. Make sure
that the website builder that you choose is a hosted website builder to
eliminate this speed bump.
Do They Include Business Email Addresses?
One of the reasons that you want to launch an online presence is to increase
brand awareness and sales opportunities, correct? Well, there is nothing worse
than having a website but emailing your clients from a Gmail or Yahoo account to
follow up on sales enquiries, I mean, would you buy from someone sending an
offer to you from joeblogs at yahoo dot dom? I know I wouldn't! Make sure that
your chosen website builder package includes business email addresses such as
your.name@yourdomainname.com to ensure that your potential clients know exactly
where you are from, to help to increase the overall professionalism and even
help to increase sales.
Are There Hundreds Of Quality Design Templates?
A website builder will generally come with a host of DIY design templates for
you to use and get started with. Make sure that your website builder package not
only comes with website templates but, good quality and well designed, pre-made
website templates. A good template will give you a solid canvas to work from,
reduce the amount of work you will have to do to enhance the design of your
website and the finished product will look a whole lot better. A good design
combined with a solid website structure will help to increase website enquiries
and ultimately, online sales.
Is There Comprehensive Tutorials To Follow?
This step and the next step are crucial for anyone who is looking to create a
website using a DIY website builder. Ensure that the website builder that you
choose has a comprehensive database of tutorials to follow that you can use as
you go along. It will be like having an open book exam and being able to refer
back to the text books for the relevant answers. Building a website using a DIY
website builder can be very easy but, if you get stuck, you want to have the
answers right there so that you can refer back to them, get the answer you need
and move on quickly, without any delays and without frustration.
Do They Provide 24/7 Support?
If you get stuck creating a website half way through your build, you want to
know that there are either step by step tutorials to follow or that there is
someone there to help or else the process of creating your website or your
website could switch from being a 30 minutes up to 3 day project all the way out
to 3 weeks or even 3 months by which time, you've lost interest, you've lost
hope and you have given up the ghost. Make sure that the website builder you
choose or have chosen comes with a 24 hour, 7 day, or even 5 day support
service, so that anytime to you have a problem, question or query regarding the
website builder or the website you are creating, you can always turn to someone
for expert advice.
HOW TO CREATE A WEBSITE...
Logo & Graphic Design
If you already have an existing offline business you will most likely already
have a logo design in place and some marketing material that you may be able to
place into your website to increase the overall look and feel of your website,
however, if you are a start-up and are just launching your offline / online
business this is most likely something that still needs to be done. There are a
couple of good options here, one would be to hire a graphic designer to design a
logo for you that will look professional and compliment your business image and
there are plenty of logo designers and graphic designers out there that will
design a logo for you for anywhere between $20 and up to $100. Alternatively,
you may decide that you are willing to give it a go for yourself to save money
of your start-up capital, in which case, there are also a few tools that you can
use to not only create logos but also eye catching banners for your website. You
may want to check out SoThink Logo Maker, many of our clients have used this
before and find it very easy to use.
Site Structure & Layout
A well thought-out website structure and layout are crucial to the overall
performance of your website. Sit down with a piece of paper before stepping into
the creation of your website and determine how you would like your website to be
laid out and what layout may increase website conversions. You want to ensure
that the structure and layout of your website is easy to navigate and point to
the places that will be not only of interest to the website visitor but will
encourage them to contact you or by your products, after all, we are not
launching a business website to give your potential clients something to read
and entertain them, we are trying to engage them and entice them to either
purchase your products and services or contact you regarding your products and
services so that you have a chance of converting that website visitor into a
long-term, paying customer.
Content & Images
After you have completed your little draft of how you want your website to be
layout out for looks and performance purposes the next step is filling your
website up with informative and relevant content and eye catching imagery. The
content should be very easy as you are the creator of your business and know
exactly what you do and what are the features and benefits of your products and
services. With creating content and inserting images here are a couple of basic
steps to follow...Have an objective, make a point, steer the reader to places of
interest, try and insert your top 5 chosen search terms into your content as
much as you can without seeming, ummmm, too spammy, with any images that you
insert, before inserting, save the image with a description of the image itself.
For Example: If you as selling toilet paper and you have an image of a man
holding a toilet roll, try and save the image as
man-holding-toilet-paper-roll.jpg and create an alternate text tag when
inserting the image as "Man holding toilet paper roll" as this will help with
the next step and if you have chosen a good quality website builder, you will
able to do this very easily.
Links & SEO
This step of the tutorial on how to create a website yourself using a DIY
website builder could go on forever as it is the most important, is a fairly
complicated and also a time consuming process. This part of the process is best
left to the experts and you are best off dipping into your start-up capital a
little and outsourcing this part of project but if you decide once again that
you want to learn and go it alone, here are some basic steps to follow. As
stated above, with your site structure, try to keep it simple, your content
should be relevant and include the search terms that you would want your clients
or your clients may search to find your products or services in a search engine.
Create links between pages within the content of your website, not only to help
visitors navigate your website but also to help search engines find pages and
then index those pages, use bold and italic text to highlight your most
important, relevant text and it will help search engines pick up the most
important terms for you website and will also help your text stand out to your
visitors. And last but probably the most important step of the whole SEO and
on-page process, create meta tags. Meta tags tell search engines what your
website is about and will be the very first thing that your client sees when
search for your services in the search engines. Be sure to add a unique title,
description and keyword set for each new page that you create and also be sure
to include your keywords in these three field to increase the chances of your
website being found for your chosen search term. A god quality website builder
will generally have these SEO features in-built and will save you from inserting
title tags and description tags manually.
HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR WEBSITE THEREAFTER...
Promoting your website on other website, otherwise known as "off-page"
optimization or "link building" is crucial to the performance of your website in
the search engines. To keep this article within the pre-defined workspace, I'm
going to need to keep this short but, here are the basics to off page
optimization in a nutshell. Create a Google account and verify your website with
Google via Webmaster Tools by uploading a HTML to your website or inserting a
meta tag verifier. A good website builder may already enable you to link your
website with a Google Webmaster Tools account but if not, a good quality website
builder will have a tutorial to how to create a Webmaster Tools account and
verify your website with Google.
Once your website is complete, try submitting your website to some online
directories, there are millions out there but try and submit to the most
relevant ones. The most important one however is DMOZ. Make sure to submit your
new / complete as it will help users find your website through direct searches
as DMOZ is a very popular directory and will also help with the search engines
as it carries a lot of weight in terms of optimization with the major search
engines.
Write articles about your products and services and post them to your
website's blog, the majority of good quality DIY website builder will enable you
to add a blog via a one click install process but if not, create a simple blog
via WordPress and publish all of your articles and posts on this blog but
remember to link your website to back to your WordPress blog. You may also
choose to publish your articles to high traffic article submission sites such as
EzineArticles and other big articles sites to help generate extra traffic to
your new website that you have created using a good quality and easy to use DIY
website builder.
That is the end of the article on
how to create a website & promote it
step by step using a DIY website builder,
I hope you find it
as informative as i found found it enjoyable to write. Feel free to check out
our DIY Website builder which is located at websitezbuilder.com, it is
very easy to use and includes all of the above features and benefits that are
mentioned above that should be included or found in any good quality and easy
to use website builder.
"What you don't know is above you, but master over what you know" when my friend pastor Joshua told to open a website, i told him that i was going to learn to create instead of just opening a website, he was ahaa!.. to become a web admin is not easy, but whiten my mind I had serious conviction that i was going to succeed in becoming a website admin. so i started moving about for the the training, the first person I meat charged me #60.000. (sixty thousand maria), the second person was from a business center i normal visit, they has a website admin,I told him to teach me web design He refused, he told me that he can only open a website for me, but to show me that he will not, but upon all these challenge i was facing about the training, I was still having the faith that i must make, so one day i remembered a guy that thought me film editing, he gave his friends contact Mr. Vincent, then i stared the training with Vincent, who was a steeping stone for me to the web deign world. He Started teaching me offline website, when we were done with the offline, he was unable to take us further, then there was this guy that i normally share some of my time with, He gave an ADSNSE PROGRAM IN A DVD PLATE, it really took me time but when i just got the DVD every thing become easy for me, you're rocky, what took me months, you will get it in less than 30 mints. Let's get started-step to step to blogging website.