Tips on how to make your own website

Calgary website development learning #1: Start with a clear idea

You need to have a concept. A concept is seen as design that solves a problem or a need. So say for example, you want to put up your own website, you need to be clear about what your website will be about. Is it a website about travel? Will it be about food? Is it going to be about both? For example, a good mentor of mine put up a website about family because he wanted to site that would take about family, parenting, and kids. His concept is about a happy family. Hence, everything about the website emanates from that concept. If you take time to research, you will find out that some Calgary website development companies actually specialize in idea generation. If you have the means, they you can contract their services for this. But if you want to try it out yourself here are some tips on how to get to the crux of what could potentially be your big idea. First, what are you interested to write about it?  Write down as many as you can, then see if you have general ideas that you can clump together. These things can be about an expertise of yours, your passion, your profession, or your vocation. Either way, you can effectively write what you know, so it has to be something that you can put down in content. Next, see what the big idea is about. Once you got that pinned down, check what target audience are you targeting? Some things to consider would be location, gender, age, socio-economic class and other segmenting categories that you might deem necessary (such as political inclinations, if you are putting up a political website). Why are these details important? Because how you write the tone of voice of website and key highlights of the page will depend on your target audience.

Calgary website development learning #2: Creating the magic first 50 content.

It is so tempting to start searching for a website development platform and hack away at the keyboard and mouse to start designing your website. While this is great and exciting, It would be great to list down your potential articles first. Remember, in the web space, content is king. So it doesn’t matter if your website looks nice, if it does not have the relevant content, then all would be for naught. A good practice would be to past the fifty article test – if you can write down fifty topics for your website, then you are good to go. Some tricks to this would be to use keywords using Google tools. This will help give you a sense on what are the related keywords to your concept. From there, you can think of your fifty titles or ideas to write about. From your fifty articles, you will get a sense of how your website would probably look like – such as, how many pages would you likely have, or how many sections, what would be on the home page and other details that would depend on what kind of content you will serve.

Calgary website development learning #3: Get your domain name and web hosting for your site

In a nutshell, a web hosting is a service that allows your website to go live on the web, while the domain name is your website address. The domain name could look something like www.knowyourwebiste.com or www.myfirstblog.ca. There are various domain name and hosting providers. Usually, there are packages wherein both are offered. For this, you would have to check your budget to see if the cost is reasonable. As best practice, the domain name should have a direct recall to your concept. Remember, this acts as your web page’s permanent address, so to speak.

Calgary website development learning #4: Choose your website development platform

Some of the famous ones would be Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla. But out of the three, WordPress would be the most used (with about 50% of people using it). It is also very easy to use – most of all, it is free! Managing it is also mobile-ready, since you can download an app that will help you manage your content even if you are on the go. To manage this discussion, let us assume that you will use WordPress. Once you’ve chosen your platform, the first thing you need to go about is to visualize what the look of the whole website would be. Again, this has to be consistent with your concept and your content. It has to be consistent with your concept. The look and feel of the website has to communicate to your target audience. For example, if you are talking to a younger crowd, then your fonts and frames might have to be hip and young. If you are talking to a more serious and mature audience, then your font, frame and color palette must fit your target audience (if you want a guide on how to look at color palettes you can check https://color.adobe.com.) For starters, you can create a few pages in your website first. Follow the categories that you formed from your initial brainstorming for your first fifty articles.

Calgary website development learning #5: Select your theme and upload content

If you are using WordPress, there are various free themes that you can choose from and you can customize them depending on what you need. You can change the headers, add widgets, change the font and add pages. The good thing with WordPress is that it is highly intuitive, so you can explore and tweak things. If you can find additional help from people who can do programming, they can also help you design and program WordPress to customize the look for you. This is where the best Calgary web developers can come in. If after doing all the steps enumerated above, you still find yourself dissatisfied, you can always look for a good web developer in your area to contract their services. At least you already have the basic covered and you can have them take a look at what else you can improve.