8 Steps to Launching a Website

When it comes to creating a website, for the majority of us, it will have been a trial and error period. I certainly remember creating my first website from scratch: askwillonline.com. I did not have much experience online and learned many lessons to blogging from the mistakes of creating this website. No doubt, other people would have been in similar shoes. This is mostly because creating websites can appear extremely cheap and quick from the outside, for which it is. But, to create a well-designed and fully-functioning website, it’s going to take a little more time and money. Taking this into consideration, here are 8 steps to launching a website.

1. Choose a platform – This should be the first thing you think about. How do you want to interact with your website? For most, the choice will be WordPress. However, there are alternatives to WordPress. If you do not need the functionality of WordPress, you might choose Blogger. If you want even more control, you may create direct coding in php.
2. Choose a domain name – This is an important element to a website. It significantly influences the amount of traffic you will receive, how recognizable your website and brand is, as well as many SEO consequences. In general, try to keep to using letters only and keep it as recognizable and short a word as possible.
3. Choose a host – Unless you have gone with Google’s Blogger, you are going to need a server to store your website’s information on: this is known as hosting. Choosing a host is an important decision, as most go for the cheapest host possible, without thinking potentially about:
   1. How the website might expand and need more hosting
   2. How good the host actually is (and how reliable they are too)
4. Design your website – Your website is going to need a theme design of some sort. You can choose to design your own, although this will be time consuming and difficult for beginners. In general, I recommend finding ‘roughly’ what you want as a theme online, purchase it, and then work with the developer to modify it to your specific requests.
5. Set up social media channels – Along with creating a website, you are going to want social media channels for your website too. Ideally, this should be on the big four (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram). If you can make your username for each the same as your domain name, you are on to a winner.
6. ‘Coming soon’ page if no content – Unless you have content ready to publish, you are going to want to stick a ‘Coming soon’ page for your website – this will keep web users in the loop regarding the status of your website moving forward.
7. Hype the launch day – The more people that know your website is launching on a certain day, the better!
8. Launch and analyse results – As soon as the website is launched, you are going to want to analyse the performance of it straight away. How people react to a brand new website is invaluable data to go off on.