Website Building for Beginners from a Beginner

The Back Story of my website building journey:-

My 1st Website was a Static Page or “Flyer” Site for my events childcare company.

Negatives:

• It cost me over $3000 completely done by a marketing company.
• Could not be adapted!

Positive:

• Looked beautiful.
• Very easy to navigate.
• They knew what they were doing

I did not know anything about website building, so I didn’t know any better.

2nd Site (well same site, less cost). I wanted more control and whilst at a business conference was introduced to MrSite.com

Positive:

• Cheep $30 per year
• Easy to change content – Content Managed System (CMS)
• Included emails that could be managed etc

Negatives:

• Didn’t look as professional as I wanted no matter how hard I tried…

The 3rd site

It was built in WordPress and after it was decided that myself and my family were moving to the other side of the world, I looked more into its capabilities.

After lots of duds in WordPress.com, I researched WordPress.org, the self-hosted side of WordPress. It allows for Plug-ins. These are juicy add-ons that can make your site really work for you, like embed lead captures, contact forms, in fact almost anything you can think of there is probably a Plug-in for it. Here is the Link for moving a wordpress.com to a wordpress.org site.

Cut Through The Crap

Here is an easy version of what you can use to get started effectively (I’ve done the faffing so you don’t have to).

• Check out michealhyatt.com > How to have a self-hosted site in under 20mins
• Get yourself self-hosted with BlueHost.com (there are cheaper but this links you straight to WordPress.org)
• Now you have your domain sorted it is good to go back to basics. HTML is the code used to build websites. Knowing even a little bit can help when it comes to putting your stamp on a site. I found HTMLDog.com very good at covering the basics of coding and means I can tailor text widgets (bits down the right-hand side of this site).
• Pick a Theme – either free or paid, just weigh up the pros & cons .i.e. does it need a shop function, widgets, look professional etc.

That should get you started. Once I’ve done some more to this site I’ll post Part 2 🙂

If you found this post helpful or you’ve had a similar journey, please Share.

Now For You: Have you ever tried to build your own website? What path did you take in your website building? Will you be having a go at building your own website now? Please Comment below.

Disclaimer: The BlueHost.com link is my affiliate link.