Do you want to create your own website? Thanks to the Content Management System (CMS) and the good will to learn and understand how it works, you will be able to make exciting projects like a fantastic blog that tells of your passions, an e-commerce that lets you start your first business online or maybe you already have an activity and want to get in touch with new customers by avoiding further weighting on the bank account. All the good reasons to commit yourself to making your first website!
How to create and manage a website? Even if it is a small blog, always requires time, passion, and curiosity to keep up to date with ever-evolving web rules, so if you do not have one of these 3 elements you should without a doubt relying on a professional who will be able to enhance your idea in the best of ways by creating a functional site that is optimized for performance and reflects all SEO directives as God wants!
Oh yeah! I just wrote “God” because as soon as you are interested in this world you will really understand what Google is, if so far it was your faithful search engine from now on it will become a kind of employer: if you do not respect its rules (which are often not officially released by the company but announced by some employees) will not be fired, but you will be saw in a few days because Google is the only company that can dictate law on the web, it will be your main source of traffic, able to bring you thousands and thousands of visitors every day.
In this article, you will find the steps to follow to put your project online, the CMS (WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop, OpenCart) will not be treated specifically for you to read the complete documentation that you will find for each single CMS directly in the web.
How to choose domain
Choosing your domain, which is more than just the web address of your site, is very important and needs to be thoroughly evaluated, it might be the key to getting a good position in a short time or why your site will be relegated to the meanders of the web.
“On paper” there are no better domains than others, but there are domains that will identify and position your brand better than others, which will improve their perception and thus the visitor’s loyalty.
So what are the best practices in domain choice?
- If you want to create a website that is targeting foreign audience, it would be more appropriate to choose the .com.
- Create your own brand, associate your content with an easily identifiable and unproductive name, the web is now packed with sites of all kinds, your goal is to distinguish yourself from the mass and crop your niche.
- Choose a simple domain name, avoiding hyphens, accented letters, and other “grammatical extravagances”, all of which will help your audience remember domain more easily.
Further help in affirming your online identity may be to opt for the new domains has recently made available to the public, and give you some examples:
- .Pizza
- .bar
- .blog
- .xxx
These new extensions allow the visitor to immediately identify your type of business and have the advantage of being valid both in Italy and abroad, being now standardized words worldwide.
New web domains are concerned, right from this time, by massive marketing campaigns in their favor, to wipe out normal initial distrust of the new product, so it will not be difficult to find interesting deals that make it your case.
The cost of the domain is unimaginable, and normally does not exceed a few tens of dollars a year.
Which hosting choose?
You will now need a server hosting your website and linking to the domain you choose (often this is done automatically by your hosting provider if you buy an offer that includes domain + hosting).
With a short search you will find a wide range of servers / hosting, and initially you may find some difficulty in understanding which one is best suited to your needs, below you will find summarized the various types of services offered and their meaning:
- Shared Hosting: It is the cheapest solution to put your website online, with the aim of reducing costs, hosting providers will host your site on a shared server with dozens and dozens of other websites, reserving a certain amount of space on the hard drive server disk. The benefits of this solution are the really inexpensive costs of the offer, with about $50 a year you will have your website online. Among the disadvantages: the limited performance available that will result in poor performance as soon as the web site receives constant daily traffic, especially if you use a CMS like WordPress and a premium theme that includes many scripts. Among the disadvantages is the low reliability that this solution implies,
- Semi-sided Hosting: Very similar to shared hosting, with the difference that you will share the same server with few other sites, so there will be more resources at your disposal, all for the benefit of performance.
- Dedicated Server: As is known by the name, this type of offer will give you an entire physical server. The advantage of this solution is in high performance, but the disadvantages will be quite high (typically over $70 / month), you will also have to handle the server yourself, unless you are offered the managed service that indicates the hosting provider’s commitment to managing the server.
- VPS (Virtual Private Server): This is a virtualization of a dedicated server, so a virtual server will create many virtual servers, completely independent of each other. With this solution, each customer is dedicated to dedicated resources and high performance; the website will not be hosted along with other customers, but will stay in a completely isolated space, greatly increasing security with shared and semi-secure hosting, a great compromise between shared hosting and dedicated server. The benefits of VPS include high performance, server control (operating system choice, firewall management, and third-party scripts installation), resource scalability, and reduced costs compared to a dedicated server (from the beginning more than $100 / year).
After this brief overview of the most popular hosting services choose the most suitable for your needs?
If you are creating a new website and you have no experience in server management you may opt for a shared hosting, initially you will have an irresistible traffic that will not require any hardware resources, nor will you worry about anything, as it will be the hosting provider to deal with server management.
When your site receives enough traffic to satiate the resources at your disposal, you will only need to buy a semi-subsidized hosting, your offer, even in this case will think of the entire hosting provider, and you will not have service interruptions.
If you want to manage the part of the server in the first place, you can opt for a VPS, guaranteeing your site’s best performance and security at a cost that is almost similar to a good semi-public hosting.
The dedicated server is to be discarded a priori if you do not have the least experience in managing it and if you’re creating a whole new project, you will not need much resources at least initially.
Whatever your service you choose, make sure you have it as a Linux operating system, a prerequisite for the proper functioning of almost any CMS.
CMS choice
Now you just have to choose the best CMS to make your website, you are spoiled for choice; below I will show you the most well known …
- WordPress: Boosted primarily as blogging software is now another thing, over the years it has been able to adapt to the new communicative needs and the great work done by the developers and the immense support community led to the creation of a magnificent software, with which you can create: Blogs, Small Ecommerce, Portfolios, Business Sites, Similar-YouTube Sites and more. The great availability of plugins, themes and tutorials online allow anyone, with some goodwill, to create an eye-catching and easy to index project.
- Joomla: Another well-known CMS Open Source, with a great support community and a host of plugins and themes extending its functions. Even though its operation is completely different from WordPress, these 2 CMSs allow you to get the same results, even with Joomla you can create various kinds of websites: blogs, corporate sites, portfolios, small e-commerce etc.
- Drupal: CMS is completely Open Source, maintained by thousands of developers around the world. More advanced than the previous one, the best choice for complex web sites that require high reliability and security. Thanks to its great flexibility and scalability, it is possible to create any type of website, from the simple personal blog to a complex institutional or e-commerce site. Much harder to learn than WordPress and Joomla.
- PrestaShop: The youngest of all CMSs in this list, born in 2007 as a CMS that is earmarked for e-commerce, is experiencing remarkable success for the creation of Ecommerce sites thanks to some of its peculiarities: ease of use, ability to handle every aspect sales (billing, warehouse management), great graphics customization and a great support community.
I just have to hope for you a big success for your next website, I hope this reading has been useful to you and has made you as clear as possible. Do you have any other useful information to complement this article? Tell them in the comments; the other readers will appreciate a lot!