Before you get started in understanding everything about a website, you need to know a very important thing: be patient and calm. You will come across a lot of information on the internet and you need to take your time to understand everything. We will talk about a few basic things that you need in order to even start building your own website.

Why get a website for yourself or your business?

It is unreasonable to operate a business, even a brick-and-mortar one, without an online presence. Customers look on the internet for everything from researching a product to the location and operating hours of any business.

Getting a website that’s well designed and optimized can give you an advantage over your competitors, and if you sell products, an eCommerce website will open up your business to new markets and locations easily.

Guide Difficulty Level

It is intended for the absolute beginner and layperson, taking you to step by step through the whole process from the very beginning.

Domain Name

What is a domain name?

A domain name is a unique online address that you purchase on an annual subscription/rental basis. Think about it as your house address. Your house address is unique and no one else can have the same house address. Anything sent to your house address will reach you. Anyone going to your house address will meet you.

If you need your own personalized or commercialized website address, and if you want to build credibility, professionalism, and unique branding for your website and business, you need to purchase a domain name. For example, our company’s domain name is paramountwp.com.

While purchasing the domain name, it needs to be registered to you or your business name. A domain name is a critical personal or business asset. Your domain name is likely to appear on all of your literature, promotional materials, and online marketing. So it is important you own and control your domain name. Always remember, from wherever you purchase the domain name, it should be bought from an account created using your own email address.

Your domain name is one of the most important features of your website. It’s a link you’ll be sharing with your current and prospective clients and promoting on social media. Therefore, you want it to be descriptive and easy to remember and type in. The safest and easiest solution is to use your brand name as your domain name. Why? Because your brand is how customers remember you. Apart from the domain name, you also need to decide which TLD (Top-Level-Domain) you want to purchase.

You also need to decide your top-level domain or TLD. This is the suffix at the end of your domain name, such as .com, .net, or .biz. Nontraditional TLD names have grown in recent years. While these can be descriptive, .com is still the popular one. If your products or services target the people of only your country, you can go for .us, .ca, .in, .au.com, etc.

You can purchase your domain names from NameCheap.com. It offers great pricing and free privacy protection. Other companies charge additional money for privacy protection.

Hosting Server

A hosting server is where you upload all your website files so that the world can see it. Every website needs a hosting server where all of the data is stored for the public to access at all times. There are many kinds of hosting servers and depending on your estimated traffic, your business goals, the type of functionality on the site, and what you will be using to build your website, you need to choose the hosting server accordingly.

Types of Hosting Servers

There are mainly two types of servers: Linux and Windows. If you are going to use HTML, PHP, or WordPress to build your website, you can go for a Linux/Apache or NGINX hosting server. If this is your first time with a hosting server, I would recommend going for a Linux/Apache-based hosting with cPanel.

Then, there are different kinds of packages in hosting servers: Shared Hosting, Cloud Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Hosting servers. They are listed down here in ascending order of pricing. While Shared Hosting is the cheapest ($5-$20/month), Dedicated Servers would cost from $150/month onwards.

Which hosting server should you choose?

A small brochure website will need a different hosting server compared to an eCommerce website. As with most things in life, you get what you pay for. A really cheap hosting server is not going to be as good as a high-end hosting server. If your website is critical to your business, then a good hosting server would be a good investment.

If you are learning the ins and outs of web designing and trying to create your own website, we recommend at least the Baby Cloud Web Hosting by HostGator. If you are getting your website developed by a web design company, talk to them about which hosting server will suit you the best. There are many great hosting servers offered by Digital Ocean, Cloudways, Amazon, Google Cloud Servers, however, configuring websites on them is not really simple.

One thing we really suggest is to not purchase the cheapest hosting server. Those hosting servers are shared by 1000s of other people and your website will take a long time to open up. There are also many limitations on such cheap hosting servers and ultimately, the hosting service providers will ask you to upgrade the plan where you will end paying a lot of money.

If you still have any questions or concerns about selecting the right hosting server, get in touch with us at hello@paramountwp.com.

SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate is a type of digital certificate that provides authentication for a website and enables an encrypted connection between the user opening the website and the website files. It is highly essential that each website or a domain name needs to have an SSL certificate installed on its hosting server. Without an SSL certificate, a website runs with ‘http’ and when you install an SSL certificate, your website then runs on ‘https’. See image below – website address with https prefix and a padlock.

If your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, website browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, etc. will notify users that your website is not safe to view.

If you choose a hosting server that doesn’t offer a free SSL certificate, make sure that you can at least install a third-party SSL certificate on that hosting server. Then, you can simply purchase a PositiveSSL certificate from NameCheap.com and install it on your hosting server.

If you are not able to follow the instructions on the hosting server on how to install a 3rd party SSL certificate, you can contact us to install it for you – hello@paramountwp.com.

Email Services

A benefit of purchasing a domain name is the ability to create domain name email addresses (example: yourname@ businessname.com). A business or a personal domain name email address reinforces credibility and professionalism as a business.

Hosting servers usually allow you to create free domain name email accounts through the cPanel. With shared hosting servers, there are IP Addresses attached to each one of them. When you use the free email accounts from such shared hosting servers, your emails get sent using the same IP Addresses. The problem is, that other people who have purchased the shared hosting server from the same company, would also share the same IP Address. If someone abuses their email accounts, the IP Address gets considered as a SPAM one. In this case, your email will most probably land in the Spam/Junk folder of your recipients.

We highly recommend purchasing Google Workspace Email Services (formerly known as GSuite). You can purchase the Business Starter Plan from here: Google Workspace.

In case you don’t want to purchase any email service, we will suggest that you use Gmail.com with a clean name. A
clean name would be your companyname@gmail.com or companynamemedia@gmail.com. Refrain from using numbers in the email address.

Website Framework

Last but not the least, you need to create your website to express your views & interests you believe in or promote your business products and services. Whatever kind of website you need, we highly recommend using WordPress to create your website. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) through which you can not only create your website but also manage all the content on it easily. WordPress makes it super simple for you to add different website pages with different text, images, videos, galleries, etc. There are many free designs also available along with many free plugins (in layman’s terms – software packs with specific features) to add different features/ functionality to your website.

This guide doesn’t include how to install WordPress on your hosting server or how to use WordPress. There are tons of guides and videos available on the internet where you can learn about this.

There are also a lot of website builder companies such as WIX, SquareSpace, GoDaddy Website Builder, however, we don’t recommend them. While you might find it easier to create websites with these website builders, there are many limitations to them. With WordPress, you get to own your website and all its files – and you can even download them to your computer as a backup. This is something that you can’t do with the aforementioned website builders.

Final Takeaway

This guide covers the basics of all the things you will need to have your own website. If you are on the journey to learn how to design websites, this guide should create a base foundation. If you want to have a website for your business, I would suggest that you get in touch with a web design company like us to create a professional website for you. If you are starting out and know nothing about website design & development, it worth outsourcing it to someone who does this for a living. You will get a professional website to kickstart your business online with proper schematics and a plan to promote the website online.