4 Steps to Creating your own Website
The website will be created in the following 4 steps.
- Planning
- Designing
- Building
- Publication and Operation
1. Planning : Determine the Direction of your Website.
Today, it is commonplace for most companies to have their own Web sites.
Today, however, a Web site does not fulfill its intended function simply by existing. First, it is important to define what you need to accomplish by creating a website.
① Clarify the Purpose of creating your Website
Clarify the “Purpose” of creating a website; the structure and design of a website will differ depending on its purpose.
For example, “to increase sales,” “to attract customers,” “to raise awareness of services,” “to increase inquiries from the website,” “to recruit human resources,” etc.
② Determine the concept of your Website
A Web site must have an attractive concept that grabs the viewer’s attention. To do this, you must first consider the following
- Who are we want to reach?
- What(Product/Service) can we offer?
- What future can we offer?
- What do we ultimately want our clients to do?
- What keywords will we use to provide information?
To do this, we need to find the customer’s problem and provide a way to solve it on our website.
③ Decide the Target Audience
Clarifying the main target audience for the website will enable everyone involved within the company to have a common understanding of the target.
This is then analyzed in more detail using the marketing technique “persona setting” to analyze the target audience. Examples of analysis items include,
- Full Name
- Age
- Place of residence
- Place of employment, job title, and position
- Employment history
- Family Structure
- How does he/she spend the weekdays?
- How does he/she spend the days off?
- Means of survey (computer, smartphone)
By analyzing lifestyle and other factors to a level where you can actually visualize your customers’ concerns and points of contact, you will be able to identify your customers. As a result, we can create a website that easily leads to results. You can create fictitious personas or use real customers as personas.
It is more effective to consider multiple personas.
④ Research & Analysis
What you need to do to achieve the objectives and goals of your website that you clarified at the very beginning is to research and analyze how you should communicate with your customers, imagining your target user personas.
For example, it is a good idea to collect and research as much of the following information as possible from a variety of sources
- measures that can be taken online, such as advertisements, social networking sites, search engines, etc.
- measures that can be taken offline, such as in-store POP, magazines, newspapers, and trade publications (for offline, you will need a website that aims to attract customers)
- industry sector trends, trends, and benchmark competitor measures.
By analyzing the information collected, determine the best way to communicate with your persona.
2. Designing website
Once you have decided on a website direction, the first two steps to creating a website design are
- Site map
- Wireframes
1. Create “Site map”
A sitemap is a map of the entire structure of a site, which visualizes the entire website and allows users to understand the paths (transitions) that lead them to the desired pages.
Start by writing down and organizing the information you want to include. If the site transitions are not easy for users to see and understand, people who have come to your website will quickly leave.
The sitemap should be designed so that users can understand the structure of the website at a glance, the information pages you want to convey are clear, and the transition to the page you want them to reach is smooth.
2. Create “Wireframes”
A wireframe is like a blueprint before the production website is built.
It “visualizes” the completed image of the actual design.
By creating wireframes, it is possible to share the design image within the company/shop, check the items to be included, and confirm ease of viewing and use.
3. Build your Website
① Prepare images and texts
First, prepare original images and text to be posted on the website.
When preparing images and text, you should never use images or text directly from a search engine, as this is an “infringement of copyright”.
If you do not have an original image, you can use a material site such as “Shutterstock”.
② Decide the design
The design should be based on the concept of the website’s purpose as determined at the beginning.
What is important here is that the design is from the target user’s perspective, not your own.
The main colors and fonts will greatly change the impression of the website, so think carefully from the target user’s perspective.
③ Website Coding
There are 2 main ways to create a website yourself.
- Write “HTML” and “CSS”
- Use ”Website creation software”
Website creation software is relatively easy and recommended for beginners.
The most famous website creation software is WordPress, a kind of CMS that allows you to create, manage, and update your website by yourself.
Since more than 40% of the world’s websites are built on WordPress (from w3techs.com), we recommend that you use WordPress to create your website, as you can often find out any points you don’t understand by searching.
Depending on the concept and target users, websites are often viewed on smartphones.
I recommend that you test your website while creating it to ensure that the design is accurate for different devices and environments, such as PCs, Smartphones, and Tablets.
4. Publication and Operation
To publish your Website, you will need to do the following
- Hosting (renting a server)
- Obtain your own domain name
- Upload files
- Initial setup
Simply put, building a website is similar to “building a house.
- “Hosting” = preparing the land
- “Domain” = to decide on an address
- “Website = build a house
- “Initial Setup” = prepare the furniture
1. Host the website
In order to publish a website, you must have hosting. Think of hosting as a place to put your website, like a piece of land. Without land on the Internet, you cannot build a house (website).
A domain is like an address on the Internet.
For example, in our website, it is the “startbusiness.work” part of “https://startbusiness.work”, and all the pages of our website use this domain.
2. Obtain your own domain name
A domain is like an address on the Internet.
For example, on this website, it is the “startbusiness.work” part of “https://startbusiness.work”, and all the pages of our website use this domain.
3. Building a website
Here, we will build a website with WordPress, which has the #1 market share in the world.
4. Initial Setup
Initial settings you must do
- Set up the theme (design)
- Set up tools
- Set up the Palmer link
- Change from “http” to “https
- Set up redirect from “http” to “https
- Add plug-ins
- Set up Google Analytics
- Set up search console
The website is ready to go!?
I really, really appreciate all your hard work!
This is the end of the website creation process.
However, creating a website is not the end of the process.
You need to keep working on your website day by day in order to increase the number of visitors and inquiries, which is the goal of a website as you thought at the beginning.
Please continue to love and nurture your original website. Enjoy and good luck!
