Step 1
Creating purposeful content
How to prepare text for your pages
Start writing as much as you can without deleting anything, and get as much of your story as you can into a single document. The easiest way to know which pages you’ll need is to get everything together first, then divide it up. To brainstorm what to write, start by listing as many keywords related to your idea as you can. You’ll need this list later for SEO, so keep it somewhere you can find it.
Goal-oriented conversion
Keep a specific goal in mind for what you want people to do once they come to your site. Each page should give visitors the information they need to make a choice, and then present them with the choice you want them to make once they’re well informed. Some common choices are:
- Purchasing a product
- Subscribing to a newsletter
- Following on social media
- Contacting you
Aligning your writing with your goals
Explain why your visitors will benefit from making the choice you want them to make, and why interacting with your site is worth their time. For example, you can use this guide to start work on your site by yourself, and if you get stuck on any of the steps, you can hire me to push through the most difficult parts.
Keep it simple, too. Web visitors skim rather than read, and clear, concise wording helps every reader, even experts. Nielsen Norman Group’s Plain Language Is for Everyone, Even Experts explains why, with practical tips.
How to prepare images for your site
Each page on your site needs a mix of pictures and text to be enticing. Find photos that help prove the information you’re giving your visitors, and save them into the same folder as the text for your pages. Once you’ve collected plenty of images, it’s much easier to pair them with text.
If you want to process the images yourself, you’ll need to resize and optimize each one. web.dev’s image performance guide covers choosing the right size and format. Then shrink each file with a free tool like Squoosh or TinyPNG. This can take seconds off your site’s load time, which matters, because people do not wait.
How to prepare a site layout
Once you have an idea of how much content you’ll display and the interactions visitors might make, lay out your images and text together, either on paper or in a document. If you’re using a website builder, you’ll be able to browse pre-made layouts. Sketching a rough wireframe first helps a lot, and you don’t need to be an artist: see How to Draw a Wireframe (Even if You Can’t Draw). If you’re building from scratch, I highly recommend researching similar sites and borrowing ideas from their layouts: column structure, where they use images, and what kinds of pages they have. Don’t plagiarize (it’s wrong, and Google will know), but there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
Every page should make the choice you want visitors to make obvious. If they don’t make it right away, offer relevant information about why that choice is beneficial, then give them another opportunity. Some examples of a choice you might want visitors to make:
- Join your newsletter
- Contact you
- Buy a product
Step 2
Building the actual website
A guide through your options
So many complex terms get thrown around in web design that it’s hard to focus on what’s actually right for you. It’s easy to get lost thinking you need something without really understanding what that thing is. That’s why I created this map of the ways to build a website, and what you’ll need to do given your first choices.
- Choose a website builder
- Use the builder’s own hosting
- Choose a theme
- Create pages in the builder and fill them with content
- (Set up a blog)
- Done!
- Use your own hosting
- Set up a local environment
- Choose a theme
- Create pages in the builder and fill them with content
- (Set up a blog)
- Create a custom theme
- Design HTML templates: home, nav, header, footer, page and blog
- Create pages in the builder and fill them with content
- Transfer files and database to the live environment
- Done!
- Create a custom site
- Create purposeful content
- Build static HTML and CSS files with your content
- Add any dynamic functionality with JavaScript
- Upload the files to a hosting company
- Done!
Deciding to use a website builder
At this point you need to choose whether to build the site yourself or use a website builder. Using a website builder is usually what independent businesses choose, but it definitely has its trade-offs. Popular builders include:
The benefits of using a website builder
A builder is by far the easiest and most convenient way to create a personal or small business website. The process basically consists of choosing a theme (or template) and filling in your pages using the builder’s tools. WordPress, for example, has an editor that looks like Microsoft Word: if you can make it in Word, you can make it in WordPress. And when you want to update your site later, it’s fast and convenient.
The trade-offs of using website builders
Website builders aren’t all peaches and cream. Most use a freemium model and know exactly when they can hook you into paying more. Once you’ve committed to one it’s not easy to switch, and you’ll pay more every month for their plans. Premium themes cost extra too, and some features stay switched off unless you pay. Sites made with builders also tend to be formulaic, so you may not be able to get exactly what you want.
Using website builders on your own hosting plan
There are ways to use a website builder without paying the company extra. Setting it up yourself can be difficult, but the lasting savings make it worth it. I highly recommend hiring somebody for a couple of hours to install WordPress on your own hosting (or following WordPress’s own installation guide for wordpress.org, not wordpress.com). Once it’s set up, you get all the same features as a site on wordpress.com without paying a premium every month.
Website builders that are independent of hosting are usually called Content Management Systems (CMS). Technically, Wix and Squarespace are content management systems too, but “website builder” is an easier term for most people. There are several great open-source options. They take a bit of extra setup at the start, but then you save money on hosting every month:
Creating custom WordPress themes
Sometimes you need a pixel-perfect, unique design as well as a friendly way to update your site and host blog authors. This method is the best of both worlds: you create exactly what you’re envisioning as HTML templates, and WordPress fills in the dynamic content (blog posts, page text, site title, headline and so on). I recommend it if you’re planning any special functionality beyond just showing people something pretty.
Creating your site from scratch
I’d be very proud of anybody who takes on this task. There’s a lot to learn about the formats you use to tell computers how to display your designs. For example, you write an entirely linear file (one word after the next), but the computer needs non-linear information, like how to create two columns on the page. To learn how to write that, you need to learn HTML and CSS.
The good news is you don’t have to learn it alone anymore. MDN’s free Learn web development course will teach you the fundamentals, and an AI assistant like Claude can write HTML, CSS and JavaScript alongside you, explain what every line does, and help you track down whatever breaks. And when you’d rather have it done right the first time, that’s exactly what I’m here for.
Step 3
Domains & hosting
How servers let others see your website
When you type yourdomain.com into a web browser (like Chrome or Safari), a lot happens automagically behind the scenes. Your browser looks up the company where the domain is registered, usually a hosting company. That company owns a computer running 24/7 (a server) that’s dedicated to sending your website to anybody who asks. MDN’s What is a web server? goes a step deeper.
Imagine putting your website files on a flash drive that anybody in the world can connect to. Hosting your site is essentially the same thing, except that instead of plugging in a drive, you log into your hosting company’s site and click a few buttons.
What you pay hosting companies for
Your hosting company owns the computer your site lives on. You pay them for maintenance, easy access to update your site, and additional services. Some common tools they offer are:
- Custom website builders
- A secure way to edit your website files
- Domain registration
- Email at @yourdomain.com
- Databases and storage
How to spot freemium traps
You can get hosting and a website builder for free, but these services charge far more for essential premium features that you only notice once you’ve committed. Most builders with a free option are aggressively geared toward getting you to buy the full version. I don’t recommend freemium sites for hosting, because once you’ve started with their tools you’re less likely to switch (and more likely to pay more). With that caveat, here are some free hosting options:
Free hosting done right
It’s also possible to host your website for free without the traps. Some options, like GitHub Pages, require that the site isn’t made with a website builder, so you’ll need to look into HTML. Others, like Google Sites, let you use a builder and still add your own code. If you want a dynamic website, being able to add your own code can be essential.
Forwarding your domain to your host
If you choose a free hosting solution but want your own custom domain name, you’ll need to set up “forwarding.” Call the support line of the company where you bought the domain, and they can guide you through the process. If you’re hosting on GitHub Pages, its custom domain guide walks through every setting.
Step 4
Advertising your website
Inbound marketing to ease visitors through your funnel
While visitors are deciding whether to make the choice you want, they should be getting value from your site. You need to hold their attention long enough to reach as many calls to action as possible. As someone moves down the page, give them useful information interspersed with calls to action, so that at any point in the funnel they’re never far from the choice you want them to make. The art is finding the thin line between not getting in the way of people who know what they want and making the case to people who need more convincing. HubSpot, who coined the term, has a good primer: What is inbound marketing?
Relying on more than word of mouth
It may be tempting to spread the word about your website by talking to people. It’s important to tell your community about updates to your services, but you can’t rely on conversation alone to promote your site. In fact, one of the main reasons people make websites is so they don’t have to describe their business to one person at a time. If you can personally reach all your customers, I’d recommend just doing that. If people are already talking about what you do, a website can harness that. If it isn’t happening yet, don’t count on it starting once you have a website.
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website more visible to search engines. SEO can’t automatically put you at the top of the results; it’s more about having a good enough site that search engines don’t ignore your listing. Most methods for improving your position aren’t an exact science, because search engines are always changing how they find better sites and stop people from gaming them. They constantly crawl new websites for relevant content to show their users. Some standard practices for becoming more visible:
- Keep people on your site once they get there
- Make your content accessible to people with disabilities (W3C’s Introduction to Web Accessibility is the place to start)
- Get other sites to link to yours (backlinks)
- Include search-engine-specific code for page descriptions and images
For the full picture straight from the source, read Google’s SEO Starter Guide.
Augmenting your SEO with paid advertising
Good search placement depends heavily on whether your site is already established, for example when people don’t try other results after visiting yours, which suggests they’re satisfied. That’s why it can be important for new sites to buy their way higher in the results until they’ve earned that standing, and why many new businesses start with paid ads.
Google Ads, for example, lets you bid for the top search result. Bids happen every time someone searches for keywords you choose. You can pay more or less depending on how relevant a search is to you, set a daily spending limit, and choose to pay only when someone clicks your ad or every time it’s shown.
Imagining your ideal customer
Before buying an ad, there are some important marketing exercises to go through. First, imagine very specific characteristics of your ideal customer. The old-fashioned method is to write out the details of a handful of realistic people; you can create as many profiles as you like, names and all. To prepare for targeting your ads, at least decide:
- What action they take on your site (purchase, email list, contact, etc.)
- Where they are (city, state, country, etc.)
- Their age or age range
- Their interests and hobbies
Nielsen Norman Group’s Personas Make Users Memorable explains how to turn these into personas your whole team can use.
Preparing to purchase your ad
Setting up the actual ad (on Google Ads, for example) is fairly cut and dry. The real finesse is creating the perfect message for the perfect person. Even once you’ve imagined your ideal customer, some important questions remain:
- How many people match my ideal customer?
- What exact wording would my ideal customer use?
- What sets my services apart from their other options?
- As my ad is shown, how can I monitor what works?
My favorite tool for investigating target markets is Google Trends. You can see search volume by location to find the best wording for your ad. For example, maybe “cupcake” gets fewer searches than “muffin,” so your bakery might want to go with muffin. The possibilities, however, are endless. So you shouldn't stop at muffin!
The mechanics behind ad auctions
When you create a campaign, you decide things like when to show your ad and how much to spend on it per day. That lets your ad provider choose an ad whenever a relevant search happens. If several businesses are all buying ads for “muffin,” “bakery” and “gingerbread,” Google needs a way to choose which ad shows when somebody searches for muffin! It’s not just the highest bid that wins; ad quality and relevance count too, as Google explains in How the Google Ads auction works.
Incorporating feedback into future campaigns
As your campaign runs, you can monitor its progress. Google Ads has a friendly analytics view for this, and it’s essential to keep learning from each campaign and adjust as you go. You’ll never hit a bullseye on a target you can’t see.
You can also track ad traffic in your own site analytics. The ads dashboard is great for seeing the journey to your site, but once visitors arrive you need your own analytics to learn from their behavior. In Google Analytics you can view ad traffic separately from normal traffic, so you can see exactly what ad-driven visits are getting you. Start by following Google’s guide to connect Google Ads to Google Analytics, or hire me to do it for you!
