WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A WEBSITE BUILDER…
Do They Offer A Free Domain Name?
One of the reasons you have decided or are considering creating a website for yourself is cost, right? And because you have little idea on how to create or design this website you want the website builder company to make it as easy as possible for you to be able to launch or publish your online presence. This is why, when you are looking for an easy to use website builder, you make sure that they offer a free domain name with your website builder package. A domain name can be just as hard to purchase and setup as a website if you do not know what you are doing so being able to combine the two and have a domain name included in your website builder package makes the process less complicated and gives you one less thing to worry about.
Does It Come With Web Hosting Included?
This step of the process is crucial, if your website builder does not come with web hosting or is not a hosted website builder then you might as well create a website from scratch as after you have created the website, you will then need to purchase hosting, configure your website settings, upload all web page files and then publish your website after that. This is a time consuming process and once again will make the process very difficult if you do not have an understanding of web hosting or how to upload files to a server. Make sure that the website builder that you choose is a hosted website builder to eliminate this speed bump.
Do They Include Business Email Addresses?
One of the reasons that you want to launch an online presence is to increase brand awareness and sales opportunities, correct? Well, there is nothing worse than having a website but emailing your clients from a Gmail or Yahoo account to follow up on sales enquiries, I mean, would you buy from someone sending an offer to you from joeblogs at yahoo dot dom? I know I wouldn’t! Make sure that your chosen website builder package includes business email addresses such as your.name@yourdomainname.com to ensure that your potential clients know exactly where you are from, to help to increase the overall professionalism and even help to increase sales.
Are There Hundreds Of Quality Design Templates?
A website builder will generally come with a host of DIY design templates for you to use and get started with. Make sure that your website builder package not only comes with website templates but, good quality and well designed, pre-made website templates. A good template will give you a solid canvas to work from, reduce the amount of work you will have to do to enhance the design of your website and the finished product will look a whole lot better. A good design combined with a solid website structure will help to increase website enquiries and ultimately, online sales.
Is There Comprehensive Tutorials To Follow?
This step and the next step are crucial for anyone who is looking to create a website using a DIY website builder. Ensure that the website builder that you choose has a comprehensive database of tutorials to follow that you can use as you go along. It will be like having an open book exam and being able to refer back to the text books for the relevant answers. Building a website using a DIY website builder can be very easy but, if you get stuck, you want to have the answers right there so that you can refer back to them, get the answer you need and move on quickly, without any delays and without frustration.
Do They Provide 24/7 Support?
If you get stuck creating a website half way through your build, you want to know that there are either step by step tutorials to follow or that there is someone there to help or else the process of creating your website or your website could switch from being a 30 minutes up to 3 day project all the way out to 3 weeks or even 3 months by which time, you’ve lost interest, you’ve lost hope and you have given up the ghost. Make sure that the website builder you choose or have chosen comes with a 24 hour, 7 day, or even 5 day support service, so that anytime to you have a problem, question or query regarding the website builder or the website you are creating, you can always turn to someone for expert advice.
HOW TO CREATE A WEBSITE…
Logo & Graphic Design
If you already have an existing offline business you will most likely already have a logo design in place and some marketing material that you may be able to place into your website to increase the overall look and feel of your website, however, if you are a start-up and are just launching your offline / online business this is most likely something that still needs to be done. There are a couple of good options here, one would be to hire a graphic designer to design a logo for you that will look professional and compliment your business image and there are plenty of logo designers and graphic designers out there that will design a logo for you for anywhere between $20 and up to $100. Alternatively, you may decide that you are willing to give it a go for yourself to save money of your start-up capital, in which case, there are also a few tools that you can use to not only create logos but also eye catching banners for your website. You may want to check out SoThink Logo Maker, many of our clients have used this before and find it very easy to use.
Site Structure & Layout
A well thought-out website structure and layout are crucial to the overall performance of your website. Sit down with a piece of paper before stepping into the creation of your website and determine how you would like your website to be laid out and what layout may increase website conversions. You want to ensure that the structure and layout of your website is easy to navigate and point to the places that will be not only of interest to the website visitor but will encourage them to contact you or by your products, after all, we are not launching a business website to give your potential clients something to read and entertain them, we are trying to engage them and entice them to either purchase your products and services or contact you regarding your products and services so that you have a chance of converting that website visitor into a long-term, paying customer.
Content & Images
After you have completed your little draft of how you want your website to be layout out for looks and performance purposes the next step is filling your website up with informative and relevant content and eye catching imagery. The content should be very easy as you are the creator of your business and know exactly what you do and what are the features and benefits of your products and services. With creating content and inserting images here are a couple of basic steps to follow…Have an objective, make a point, steer the reader to places of interest, try and insert your top 5 chosen search terms into your content as much as you can without seeming, ummmm, too spammy, with any images that you insert, before inserting, save the image with a description of the image itself. For Example: If you as selling toilet paper and you have an image of a man holding a toilet roll, try and save the image as man-holding-toilet-paper-roll.jpg and create an alternate text tag when inserting the image as “Man holding toilet paper roll” as this will help with the next step and if you have chosen a good quality website builder, you will able to do this very easily.
Links & SEO
This step of the tutorial on how to create a website yourself using a DIY website builder could go on forever as it is the most important, is a fairly complicated and also a time consuming process. This part of the process is best left to the experts and you are best off dipping into your start-up capital a little and outsourcing this part of project but if you decide once again that you want to learn and go it alone, here are some basic steps to follow. As stated above, with your site structure, try to keep it simple, your content should be relevant and include the search terms that you would want your clients or your clients may search to find your products or services in a search engine. Create links between pages within the content of your website, not only to help visitors navigate your website but also to help search engines find pages and then index those pages, use bold and italic text to highlight your most important, relevant text and it will help search engines pick up the most important terms for you website and will also help your text stand out to your visitors. And last but probably the most important step of the whole SEO and on-page process, create meta tags. Meta tags tell search engines what your website is about and will be the very first thing that your client sees when search for your services in the search engines. Be sure to add a unique title, description and keyword set for each new page that you create and also be sure to include your keywords in these three field to increase the chances of your website being found for your chosen search term. A god quality website builder will generally have these SEO features in-built and will save you from inserting title tags and description tags manually.
HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR WEBSITE THEREAFTER…
Promoting your website on other website, otherwise known as “off-page” optimization or “link building” is crucial to the performance of your website in the search engines. To keep this article within the pre-defined workspace, I’m going to need to keep this short but, here are the basics to off page optimization in a nutshell. Create a Google account and verify your website with Google via Webmaster Tools by uploading a HTML to your website or inserting a meta tag verifier. A good website builder may already enable you to link your website with a Google Webmaster Tools account but if not, a good quality website builder will have a tutorial to how to create a Webmaster Tools account and verify your website with Google.
Once your website is complete, try submitting your website to some online directories, there are millions out there but try and submit to the most relevant ones. The most important one however is DMOZ. Make sure to submit your new / complete as it will help users find your website through direct searches as DMOZ is a very popular directory and will also help with the search engines as it carries a lot of weight in terms of optimization with the major search engines.
Write articles about your products and services and post them to your website’s blog, the majority of good quality DIY website builder will enable you to add a blog via a one click install process but if not, create a simple blog via WordPress and publish all of your articles and posts on this blog but remember to link your website to back to your WordPress blog. You may also choose to publish your articles to high traffic article submission sites such as EzineArticles and other big articles sites to help generate extra traffic to your new website that you have created using a good quality and easy to use DIY website builder.
That is the end of the article on how to create a website & promote it step by step using a DIY website builder, I hope you find it as informative as i found found it enjoyable to write. Feel free to check out our DIY Website builder which is located at websitezbuilder.com, it is very easy to use and includes all of the above features and benefits that are mentioned above that should be included or found in any good quality and easy to use website builder.
