4 Things I Wished I Knew Before Starting a Website

There’s not a single problem with wanting to start a business and run away from your current job – many thousands, if not millions, of people have similar ideas about their careers. For the majority, they will turn to the internet since it is an expanding market and is extremely flexible for start-up businesses – the website you first create can be designed and contain whatever you want on it. What a freedom to have when starting a website business. However, as with many new start-ups on the internet, understanding how to best start-up he website and business is tricky: especially if you are lacking expertise in certains fields. For this reason, from starting up and running several websites for around 7 years, here are the top 4 things I wished I knew before I started up some of my website businesses.

1. Learn to code – A lot of the work you do when you create a website will be ‘learning on the job’. As much as this is productive in the sense that you learn while you work, for some skills, it is just a little too much. One of these is coding, be it in php, java, C, C++ or HTML. It is vital to know how to code online since your website’s template and article’s will all require some expertise in coding to change it the way you want to and to implement effective SEO. I would recommend paying for an online service to help you to learn to code or watch a lot of YouTube videos to start off with!
2. Don’t get distracted on the small negligible things – When you first create a website, the chances are you are either doing this by yourself or with one or two other people. No matter what your situation is, you need to make sure you are as productive as possible in the first few months of creating your website. For example, out of these two examples, it is best to tackle point 1 first before point 2 and not the other way around:
   1. You have a problem with your website’s layout, or that it is not mobile optimised.
   2. You also have a problem of spreading awareness over social media using your website’s exisiting channels.
3. Forget about making money – Although you website will have the intentions of doing this, to begin with, you need to be less about making money and more about producing a website that delivers a service (or whatever it is your website does). Once you achieve this, you can then start concentrating on the generating revenue side.
4. Forget about comparing to current competition – Although it is difficult to not do this and having a baseline of what you want to achieve, based on compeititon, you should not continually compare your website against competitors that have been in the industry you are moving into far longer than you. This is because:
   1. The vision of your website might alter based on your obsession for your competition.
   2. It will waste your time where it could be better spent elsewhere with your website.