Guide to setting up a website

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                                    Setting up a website is one of the fundamental steps one need to do in order to run an online business. Most people who are new to online business tend to take decisions on website design, in a hasty manner. The design of each website is very important since pontential customers get the first impression of your business by looking at your website. In this article, you will learn what are the important things that one need to keep in mind while building their website,different methods of hosting your website and different platforms on which you can build your website on. So follow along!

Choosing a domain name:

Before building your website, you need to choose a proper domain name for your website. The domain name should be catchy and attractive yet it should give some idea about the type of your business. For example, if you are going to run a consultancy business online, then you may choose your domain name as Maverickconsultants.com(say).  You can go to domain name registrars and check whether domain name is available or not. 

Website hosting:

Website hosting is as important as the domain name itself. One needs to be very careful in choosing the web-hosting company. There are several web-hosting companies in the market. One should not always sign up with the cheapest service provider.  One important criteria in selecting a web-hosting company is the ‘downtime’.  Good web-hosting companies have excellent maintenance staff and downtime will be kept minimum. If downtime exists,visitors to your site will not be able to access your site. This causes bad impression among potential customers and would lead to decrease in revenue. By searching for good reviews on various webmaster forums one can choose a good web-hosting provider.

Website platform:

Gone are those days when every website is created by typing numerous lines of code. Building websites is far less complex now than ever before! Thanks to Content Management System CMS platforms. What CMS platform does  is allows everyone to create good looking websites without knowing the ins and outs of html coding. Wordpress and Joomla are the two major CMS platforms now.  If you choose to build your website using any of the popular CMS platforms then you can save significant amount of money and time on website maintenance costs. You have to hire a web designer only once or twice to do the initial designing of your website. CMs platforms makes it easier for anyone to update and upload content on their websites. What this means is that you will be able to upload and edit content on your website without having to hire a webdesigner.

Type of website:

The type of website is to be selected based on the type of marketing you intend to do with your website. If you are planning to sell merchandise like clothes, toys or any physical products, then you can build an ecommerce site. If you plan to add content to your site periodically and charge customers to access the various levels of content on your site then you can choose a membership site. Depending upon the needs of the business owner, websites  can be modeled in many different ways. I hope this article helped you to some extent in setting up your website.