How to Create a Website in 5 steps

 

How to Create a Website in 5 steps

 

 

How to Create a Website in 5 steps

Things You Need In Order to Build a Website

• Domain name (your custom web address, www.YourSite.com)
• Website hosting (service that hosts your website)
• Wix.com (free, commonly used website platform)

To build a fully functional website, you’ll need to secure a domain name (web address) and a web hosting account. These two make sure that your website is fully accessible to others. Without one or another, you will be unable to set up a website.

Once you’ve finished the guide, you’ll have a fully working website online, on a custom domain name, and fully accessible by others.

Ready? Let’s get started…

Below are our 5 steps to create a website.

They are:

·         Step 1: Choose a domain and register it

·         Step 2: Set up a Wix account

·         Step 3: Customize your website

·         Step 4: Connect your domain

Let’s jump into each step now.

Step 1: Choose a domain and register it

It’s crucial that you nail the domain name first.

After all, this is how people will remember your website and your brand. You want them to associate with something memorable, yet unique to your business.

But there’s bad news: Most of the good domain names are taken.

The Internet has been alive for four decades now. Of course the good ones have been snagged .

Luckily, there are still ways to come up with a good domain name for your brand:

·         Easy to say and spell. Rule of thumb: Potential visitors should be able to say your domain at a bar with their friends without them having to ask twice how to spell or say it.

·         Short and sweet. We recommend no more than 14 characters. You don’t want an overly long domain name that’s hard to remember and say.

·         Go with .com, .org, or .net. While there are plenty of domain name systems out there, it’s best to stick with the tried-and-true ones. You want people to be able to remember it after all.

·         Use your name. Great choice for a personal blog, website, or portfolio.

·         Avoid numbers and hyphens. This just makes it look weird in the URL. Plus it makes it harder for people to say what your URL is to others.

If you want to learn more about this, check out our article on how to buy the right domain name.

Come up with a list of 5 – 10 potential domain names. Then go to Domain.com to see if any of your domains are available.

If you have a few available, great! Choose the one you like the most and use that for your website domain. If you don’t have any available, that’s okay.

I recommend you brainstorm more ideas and search until you do find an available domain. Alternatively, you can buy a domain — but I really don’t recommend doing that because it’s very expensive. In fact, domains typically cost a few thousand dollars at minimum. I’ve seen it go as high as six figures for a domain.

Once you do that, let’s jump into web hosting.

Step 2: Set up a Wix account

Website builders like Wix make things extremely easy.

Simply go to their site, pick a domain that’s available, and use their software to put everything together. They walk you through every step.

Wix is absolutely perfect for:

·         Restaurants

·         Local businesses

·         Freelancers

·         Hobby sites

·         Student groups

·         Community projects

·         “Resume” sites

·         Short term projects

Notice something about these sites? You don’t need to go super crazy with traffic building. Instead, you simply need a site that has a few pages when people want to know more about the business or project.

Website builders like Wix do have a few downsides. They don’t handle large sites and lack the advanced features you’d need for building large amounts of traffic. Most businesses don’t need this anyway so a basic website builder is more than enough. You’ll get more value out of the simplicity and won’t notice the lack of advanced features. You won’t need them anyway.

Now that we’ve covered that, let’s jump into how exactly to build a Wix website.

Click on the Get Started button in the middle of the page.

Create an account with Wix by entering your email and creating a password. You can also use Facebook or Google to create an account.

From here, they’re going to walk you through a series of questions to tailor your website building experience to you. Answer the questions as you see best.

Step 3: Customize your website

After you answer the questions, you now have two options:

·         Use Wix ADI. This is their artificial design intelligence solution that automatically creates a website for you after you enter in a few more details about your website. This is the easiest route.

·         Create your own. Choose a template from the Wix Editor and create your own website. While this route is more hands on, it’s still very simple and straightforward.

The choice is up to you. If you want a bit more control over your website’s design, choose the second option. If you want to get through it a little faster or if you’re nervous about creating your first website, choose Wix ADI.

For now, we’re going to choose to create our own website using a template. Click on Choose a Template.

On the next page, Wix offers you a host of free templates to choose from based on your answers from Step 3.

Search through them now for a template you want to use. Can’t find a good one? Use their search function or the navigation buttons to find new templates.

Choose the template you’d like to use. If you’re wondering how it would look as a website, you have the option to view the demo by hovering your mouse over the template in the menu.

Once you’re ready, click on Edit on the template you want to use.

The Wix website editor will automatically appear in a new tab. In this editor, you’ll be able to make changes to the design of the template. You’ll also be able to change any text you see.

If there’s an element you want but don’t see, you can use the editing menu on the left hand side to add it to the page.

Spend the next hour or so making adjustments to the website as needed. Click on Preview whenever you want to see what it’ll look like when all is said and done.

Once the text is edited and you have everything you want in your website, click on Publish in the top right corner.

Once it’s published, you’ll have a customized Wix domain to your website.

Remember the domain you registered in Step 1? Now it’s time to connect it with your Wix account.

Step 4: Connect your domain to Wix

Before we jump into the steps to connect your domain, we need to upgrade to a Wix Premium Plan.

From the window we last left off, click on Upgrade Now.

You’ll be taken to a new window that allows you to choose a paid plan. Prices start at $23/month for Business plans and $8.50 a month for normal website plans.

To accept payments you’ll want to go with a Business plan (that might come in handy later, and we’ll go into that in a bit).

All the paid plans allow you to connect your domain to your Wix website.

Choose the plan that you’d like to use. You’ll then have an option to choose the subscription period for the plan.

The cheapest option will always be the 3 year subscription period. That means you’ll pay in full for three years of your Wix subscription—but it winds up being cheaper each month.

Once you’ve upgraded to a premium plan, head back to your website’s dashboard, and go to the Settings > Domains.

Click on Connect a domain you already own.

Select the Wix site you want to connect your domain to then click Next.

Enter in your domain name. Then click DNS near the Connection Method at the bottom. Choose Pointing.

Click Confirm. Then click Next.

Now you need to update your domain’s DNS records.

To do that, head back to Domain.com and head to your Domains Dashboard.

Click on Manage underneath the domain you want to point to Wix.

Click the settings icon on the side of the domain.

Click on DNS & Nameservers.

Click on the three dots on the right side of the nameservers.

Now you’ll be able to change the name servers. To connect to Wix, change the name servers to the following:

·         For yourdomain.com, create an A record that points to: 23.236.62.147

·         For www.yourdomain.com, create a Cname record that points to: www141.wixdns.net

Once you do so, click on Submit your changes.

It will take 1-2 days for the website to fully process this change. Once it does, the domain will point to your Wix website!