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Let’s start off with a scenario:
You’ve just registered your LLC on the secretary of state’s website and you opened up your business bank account. With your EIN number in one hand and a checkbook in the other, you are ready to start pouring hours of effort into your business. You realize that if you are going to make any meaningful progress, you need an effective website. The panic sets in, because you have no coding experience, and only have a few hundred dollars in the bank. Like every other technical situation, you are now the company’s IT guy; tasked with figuring out how your company can gain a presence on the web.
Luckily in today’s world, everyone needs a website. Whether it’s for your business, club, or hobby, there are an abundance of tools out there that make it extremely easy to build a successful website without knowing anything about software development. This means that instead of paying 10K for a freelance developer, you can pay less than $200 and be set for the year. All in under 20 minutes.
Now, there are a multitude of ways you can go about doing this and a number of those solutions are available at literally no cost. However, we are going to exhibit how you can build a website that is cheap (extremely cheap compared to hiring a developer at 50+ dollars an hour) and scalable in the event that you one day need a developer to assist you in hurdling more complicated situations.
With that in mind let’s preface what this setup is not meant for:
- If you want to start a blog and don’t care about traffic, followers, or legitimacy, you should instead go with a free option such as WordPress.com. This allows you to have your own blog with nearly zero setup. The downside of this solution is that your URL will always end in “.wordpress.com”, which is explicitly unprofessional.
- If you are jump-starting a service that conducts a high amount of business through your website, such as a drop-shipping e-commerce company, you certainly can start out this way – we just wouldn’t recommend it. Without a developer by your side, you will have a strong learning curve, and could potentially commit mistakes that lead to negative business perception along the way.
On the condition that you need a brochure website that informs customers who you are, what you’re about, and what people can expect from you, then here are the steps you need to take to put your business ahead of the game.
There are five main steps to building a website:
- Purchase your URL
- Purchase hosting
- Download WordPress
- Find a theme
- Start building!!!
PURCHASING YOUR URL AND HOSTING – $107.16
First you have to decide what your URL is going to be. If you already have a name for your company, this is typically an easy decision by slapping a “.com” on the end of it. However, you also need to use a little common sense with this. If your company is 50 characters long, you obviously need to think of something shorter. Get those creative juices flowing, and generate a domain that people will easily remember. You want something that will stick. Try not to use an abbreviation if it doesn’t make any logical sense. Finally, it is wise to keep a couple URLs on the backburner in the event that your primary choice is already taken.
Whether it’s hostgator, namecheap, or goDaddy, there are a plethora of places where you can easily register a URL. Although there are many great hosting services available, we recommend registering and hosting your website with the same service. This allows you to consolidate your security passphrases while also minimizing the number of support teams you interact with in the future.
Here at Abundance, we both use and recommend Bluehost for website hosting. While many different hosting companies will get the job done, we’ve found the UX of Bluehost to be the easiest to use, and has the best support team. Finally, with Bluehost you receive your first URL free when you begin your hosting subscription. Unless you are starting multiple websites at once, the basic version is more than enough for nearly anyone. When it’s all said and done, this will cost you $119.16. The setup process is relatively straight forward; however, we will take you step by step from start to finish.
First, you need to find out if your URL is available. Once you’ve come up with a URL that isn’t taken, you can begin filling out basic account information.
While the pricing is advertised as a monthly amount, Bluehost only bills annually. Due to this, you can choose whether you want to pay for 1, 2, or even 3 years upfront. There are also many different add-ons you can choose from–3 of which are added by default.
Domain Privacy Protection – BUY
Domain Privacy Protection keeps your name and email address hidden from the public records. While you might not care whether or not people know that you own the domain, this is a small price to pay; once you buy the domain, you will get emails (almost daily) from spam accounts and people trying to sell you “website design services.” Long story short: we definitely recommend this.
Codeguard Basic – RECOMMENDED
Codeguard Basic is a useful service by Bluehost that backs up your website daily, monthly, or yearly–all based on your preferences. If you’re well-versed in backing up websites and prefer doing it on your own, then this is an alternative that can be an easy way to save a bit of cash. We like the ability to be hands-free and backup our website whenever we want. Start forming a habit early to backup your website frequently.
SiteLock Security – STAY AWAY
While it is also important to have some sort of security for your website, it’s hard to understand why SiteLock is so popular. They have a few million users,
Your Bluehost
Downloading WordPress
Why WordPress, and not Squarespace which you have heard about on every podcast you’ve listened to? Well, it’s because even though squarespace and other website building platforms are fine to use, WordPress is the most used and still the industry standard. This means that it is the most supported, has the most themes, and is known by every web developer, which is why we use it and recommend it.
But before you can use it, you have to install it on your website, which there is an easy way and a hard way to do it. The hard way would be to download the file straight from WordPress.org and manually install it onto your website, which if this is the first time you’ve ever worked with a website can be a nerve-racking venture. Instead you can download it with a single click from Bluehost and it does the exact same thing.
Inside the Bluehost
After clicking continue you will need to type in your URL and then leave the second space titled “directory” blank. This means that it will be uploaded into the root of your website.
Next, you’ll need to come up with a username and password for the WordPress portal on your website.
If you scroll down you will find this option for Mojo Marketplace to “Do it for you” but this is completely unnecessary and extremely expensive. Make sure you ignore this.
Once WordPress has completely installed (which should only take a minute or two), you can find the credentials to your portal by clicking on the link below.
From now on, to get to the content management portal of your website, you simply need to add the extension “wp-admin” to your URL as shown below.
This will bring you to the following login screen:
Congratulations, you’ve downloaded WordPress and technically could start building your website right now. However, you would be using the default WordPress theme which is fine for a personal blog, but in most
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Hovering over the WordPress menu you will find all of the different categories of templates that you might want. While all themes serve the same purpose of making your website look attractive, not all themes are equal. There’s a few tricks to make sure that you get a good theme that will work for what you want.
- Just like finding a restaurant you want good reviews and downloads, and you want a lot of them. Specifically thousands of them.
- Once you find a couple that fit this criteria, you also want to look at the demo of the website to see if you like any of the different ways they lay it out, and how it looks.
- Finally, make sure that it comes with plugins that will be relevant to you. Usually this includes a drag-and-drop builder such as Visual Composer. By making sure it’s included in the theme you won’t have to buy the plugin separately.
Once you find one you like, buy it (themes generally cost between $20 and $80) and download the zip file. Specifically you will want to download the “Installable WordPress file only”, as this makes it super easy to download and go straight to uploading it onto your website without having to mess with any files.
Once you have it downloaded, go back to your WordPress tab, click on “Appearance”, then “Upload”.
Click “Upload Theme” one more time,
And you will be brought to this screen which allows you to upload the zip file you just downloaded.
Simply click install and when it says “Theme installed successfully.” click “Activate”.
And with that your theme is installed. You may need to activate the plugins that came with your theme, which can be done under the “Plugins” tab.
Now you are ready to start building your website. Whether starting from scratch or inputting one of the demos you’ll need to become familiar with WordPress in general. This all comes with time and after about a week you should be feeling pretty confident on how things work with your theme.
All we can say is, happy building!
Team Abundance