How to design a website on your own!

I DID IT. YOU CAN TOO.

Dancing Candles

Amongst many things that I learnt in Digital Marketing, this was perhaps the most rewarding one. Before I did this, designing a website was all about finding a right site designer, who’d give you a jazzy page, code it, test it and then leave you with it. With not much leverage to edit it or manage it as you move along. But that's history now! 

In today’s day and age of DIY furniture and toys, putting together a website of your choice is no big deal. And it also gives you complete control to edit and manage it after you have published it. It’s really no big deal. I can say that since I have just finished publishing a website for a new company that I have just launched. My sincere recommendation would be to visit www.dancingcandles.co before you actually read rest of the article.

Google Site & Wordpress are the most prominent names when one thinks of designing a website on their own. However, I chose to go with GoDaddy’s website builder tool which is easy to use and has plenty of templates to choose from. They have very well designed templates and are arranged as per categories. For example if you’d like to design a site for a coffee house, simply choose the category restaurant and sit back with a cuppa to decide which one would you like to go ahead with. So let’s get started on how I made www.dancingcandles.co

BUY A WEBSITE BUILDER PLAN.

As explained before, you need to choose which site builder would you like to go for. Usually all of them are pretty much the same except for their skin or interface. It really depends on which one you get more accustomed to. More or less each one’s functionalities are too the same. They allow you to do everything you need to get a great site going. For DancingCandles.co I chose to go ahead with GoDaddy’s website builder plan, since I bought the domain from them as well. The package deal they offered me was quite nice. If I buy the website builder tool plan, they give me my domain name free. Which means savings from the word GO. As a user, let me inform you that you’d need Google chrome to get the best out of this tool. I am an ardent safari user, I had some serious issues until I downloaded chrome. After which life became pretty smooth. To get started, simply register yourself  and buy a website builder tool plan.

Choose a Theme

Once you have registered and bought your plan you are ready to get started. Launch the website builder tool. It will take a couple of seconds and it is recommended that you do this with high speed internet connectivity by your bedside. These things work best with fast connections. As soon as the tool open up, the journey from here is pretty self explanatory. The tool has enough spoon feeding prompts that actually starts annoying you after a while. Start with choosing a relevant theme for your site. It will be a good idea not to have any preconceived designs in your mind before using this tool. That will just make you design a site that neither good nor bad. Just du-h. You don't want to do that. Let the experts guide you, while you concentrate on the back end. So choose a relevant theme and you are almost there.

GIVE YOUR SITE WELL PLACED SEO RICH CONTENT

Every page will have preset layout with DUMMY content placed in it. All you need to do is replace the content with text that is relevant for your site. I really don't need to tell you what goes where when it comes to making a site’s content SEO rich. But I will soon be releasing another blog to give you some tips on what I’ve been learning. However, I’d advice you to spend some time and choose a font that gives your headline that perfect design touch. There are plenty to choose from and smart fonts can make your content talk smarter. And just when you think you are done, here comes the scoop. You can put titles and descriptions for each page to make easier for search engines to spot your site. You will find this in the settings tab of whichever site builder tool you are using. Making your site truly SEO optimized with relevant content. Not just on-page. But back-end too.

PLACE PICTURES, VIDEOS, BUTTONS & FORMS

Yes sir, you can do it all with a click of a button. You can not only upload your pictures but also choose from a gallery of stock pictures that usually comes FREE with the website builder tool plan. That’s what I have used on my website. None of these pictures are mine. They are all taken from the stock pic gallery. I can also place a video link that shows videos without taking my viewer out of my site. Ensuring maximum engagement with minimum bounce rate. You don't want them to be going out especially when you have slogged your *^@ getting them to you site. And finally you have forms with ready fields. Just place them wherever you think your customer requires to fill it up  and send it to you. Making your site extremely engaging, interactive and lead generating.

LET THEM SHARE AND FOLLOW YOU

These tools come with ready to use widgets that just need to be placed and you are ready to go. No more hassle of giving your developer all the codes and then struggling with their positions and sizes. Just have it the way you want and take it off if you think its not working.

SHOW THEM WHERE YOU ARE

The contact us page is not as basic either. It gives you ample of jazz (along with maps) to show where you are located. Linking your site with Google’s webmasters and Google+ page will further strengthen your position on Google Maps. It will also help GoogleBots or search spiders crawl and index your site faster. So it is recommended that you do that.

LET GO UNDER THE HOOD NOW

While I have almost covered most of the design aspect, this is the section that truly got me excited. Coding. This was reserved for website developers for like centuries. Not anymore. Now the power is in your hands. To start with, you can add Meta Tags like Keywords in your page by going to settings where the page appears in source code format. It is recommended that you put this in the <HEAD> section. Doing this is pretty simple. Go to goolge and ask how its done. You will get ample of information on how to insert keyword tags. 

You can also add your unique Google analytics code in the footer (because that doesn't slow down your site download speed) and measure its performances in Google Analytics.

Alongside, you may also paste conversion codes, traffic source codes to monitor conversions and major lead generating sources to make informed decisions regarding your online campaigns.

THIS IS THE BEST PART

Most website builder tools optimize your desktop site to mobile sites. Yes, they do. Something that regular developer or designers cringe to do, either because they are too lazy or they simply find it difficult. Or because they want to make that extra cream off you. You design your site and simply choose the option to optimize for mobile viewing. That’s it. You are ready with a site that is apt for every device. 

You also get a suggestion preview of what your social pages should look like. This one’s a killer. Once you are almost done with designing your site and putting all the content, just go to the social branding preview mode. It will showcase a real time look and feel of how your brand’s facebook and twitter page should look like. This feature is brilliant as it actually saves you the effort of thinking how to design social media pages. It also helps you score nice brownie points with your client since there isn’t much done there. And in the end, it makes all the digital assets look like from the same family. 

Once all done, you can publish your site on your way to the market. It’s actually as simple as that. The publish tool is simple to use and links your designed site with your domain within minutes. And of course let’s you edit, revise or add anything that you’d want as you move along. As compared to sites done from developers, where you are left at their mercy and charges for every revision made.

Yes, the site’s back end coding does have its set of limitations. After all you are using a preset template. But nothing so major that will make you yell. The takeaways are far more than setbacks here. Especially when all of this comes for as low as INR 1000! Yup. That’s what I spent erecting my site.

So if you think you have a client who doesn't have great budget today, but can be milked for months to come, then offer him to build a site with one of your preferred website builder tools. They are easy to use, offer brilliant predesigned templates and let you edit them as and when you like.

The best thing about building a site on your own is that it gives you an indepth understanding about what is going right and wrong with it. It also gives you a good hand-on training with tools, that helps you get better with your online marketing skills. 

There is this limitation that some website builder tools don't allow you to put keyword meta tags. But there is a secret to that. And I will discuss this at length in my next blog. Hope you enjoyed this one. Do share your own home-made website with me, when you are done.

Cheers,

V