ABC of setting up a website and beyond

b4bmm

Hi,

I dont know much at all about website set-up, design and optimisation but am curious to find out what are the steps to setting up a good website?

I have heard about companies such as Squarespace, I'm sure there are many more? They seem to charge a fixed monthly fee for the ability to do it through them. Can a website not be done for free, or even if there is a cost needed to set it up can ongoing maintenance be free? I dont know about domains, web hosts or whatever else there is.

I will over the next few months try to educate myself much more but just want to get the ball rolling and have a general idea of whats involved and then try and get into the specifics after that. All my spare time, outside of my day job (and often while at work also) has been immersed with stockmarkets over the past while. It all relates to trying to get a second source of income while still maintaining my main employment.

Hope I have posted in the right thread, not sure where I can get the best response to this question, here or under business.......

Thanks

EIREHotspur

With websites as with everything in life....if you want free then you don't expect a whole lot for that.

Anything wothwhile or of a good standard costs time and that usually costs money.

Try Wix, Wordpress etc....but if you intend learning then expect to take a while to get anything of a good standard...

Bergmann

Hi there,

I would say the main things to think about are the web design, hosting and domain name. As for web design, I would go for something with ready made templates that you can customise, i.e. Wordpress or something similar. It's also really important to get a domain name (although alot of businesses tend to overlook this somehow), it is basically your brand name and once you register a domain it means no one else can use it. There's a good intro to the basics of domain registration here.


Of course there are costs associated (as with most things) but if you plan on doing this in the long term and using it to make money, the benefits should hopefully outweigh the costs. Hope this is somewhat useful, but yes keep doing your research and find out what options suit your personal situation best.

Jd215k

It is a costly business, setting up a.ie domain can range anywhere up to 70€ between registering it as a business etc. Then your hosting, maintenance, building the site, making sure its mobile friendly, an most of all the seo can cost a minimum of 500 a month with some companies with very little reresults I have experience in all these areas. So I would advise you to think hard about this before you go ahead. There is free sites that will allow you to build sites but your business/name/ web address will be conected to their address. So it really won't be yours and will be useless to you unless you intend on handing out the full address to potential customers. I would recommend going for a .com and adding some of your trade in the address name and maybe the area your in like Dublin or Ireland etc.

Trojan

How do you intend to monetise the site? That makes a big difference in the advice we give you.

m0rt

I would start by thinking about your website visitors or "users". What are their goals and how will your website help them achieve these goals? What tasks will they need to perform to achieve each goal?

Goals can be things like getting updates on stock markets or purchasing shares.

Tasks will be series of steps based on each goal so things like logging in to an account, filling in a form, downloading a file, searching for content, adding to basket.

This will give you an idea of the functionality you require and when you know that, you'll have a better idea of what options are available to you. You might be able to use an out of the box system like Squarespace if its a purely content based site, you might be able to find a whitelabel service that you can rebrand that checks all the boxes, or you might need to build from scratch.

donaldtramp

All the people who say you can't make a website for free are imbeciles. I myself have made several websites for free.

All you need is programming skills and a free webhost. Sure, they're limited, but most of them offer a lot of storage and they can be optimised to not use up too much space. You can setup wordpress on a lot of these sites, and from there, go editing away. Follow tutorials to setting up wordpress and configuring it to a database, then go ahead and login to your wp account and you're all set to use the wp editor.

In terms of setting up a domain name, you can use the free sub domains offered by many webhosts, which are really bad, but will work until your website is ready, and from there you can park a .com domain on top of it, and nobody would ever notice a difference.

Of course once you have the website up, you may want to invest in advertisements, etc and maybe try and pay someone to make graphic designs for the site if you can't make them yourself.

Trojan

donaldtramp wrote: »

All the people who say you can't make a website for free are imbeciles. I myself have made several websites for free.

+1 Very, very good post. Beautiful post.

IMO everyone who makes a generalisation is a total imbecile.

--

Meanwhile, back on Earth...

OP, if you have a lot of time on your hands and don't mind a steep learning curve, then sure it is possible to build a website yourself for free.

But don't use a free hosting service. Even hobby sites should be on paid hosting - it's not that expensive.

Decent Skin

Jd215k wrote: »

It is a costly business, setting up a.ie domain can range anywhere up to 70€ between registering it as a business etc. Then your hosting, maintenance, building the site, making sure its mobile friendly, an most of all the seo can cost a minimum of 500 a month with some companies with very little reresults I have experience in all these areas. So I would advise you to think hard about this before you go ahead. There is free sites that will allow you to build sites but your business/name/ web address will be conected to their address. So it really won't be yours and will be useless to you unless you intend on handing out the full address to potential customers. I would recommend going for a .com and adding some of your trade in the address name and maybe the area your in like Dublin or Ireland etc.

There's no way that SEO should cost €500 a month if a site is set up correctly and is updated regularly with relevant content.

I've done quite a few high-performing sites which require nothing more from the owner than regular relevant updates, with the SEO looking after itself.

Sure, the site was a premium build in some regards, with a custom-build CMS, but even then the €4K cost would have - by your figures - made itself back in under a year.

The main thing is to have a proper SEO-friendly structure that has content grouped and categorised logically, with proper navigation and avoiding fads and client-side stuff that Google can't "see" properly.

Make the above simple to update with SEO-aware titles & links, and drop a good visual & mobile-friendly design on top of that, and you're sorted! No ongoing cost bar the hosting and the occasional upgrade.

donaldtramp

Anyone with have a brain and a keyboard can optimize SEO enough to have a few solid keywords.

I know the "spam SEO" thing was big like 10 years ago and can land you a penalty nowadays but I'm still a fan of it.

Backlinks of course is the way to go though, you can pay people on Fiverr for backlinks, pretty sure backlinks from .edu domains are worth the most in terms of the "Google Leaderboard", lets be honest, nobody cares about Bing.

donaldtramp

Trojan wrote: »

But don't use a free hosting service. Even hobby sites should be on paid hosting - it's not that expensive.

Why would anyone create a website on paid hosting when you can get a free 2GB space, 100GB traffic, PHP and MySQL for free with no ads or banners?

I know it's not "great" but it's fine for just getting things started. IDK how many people make the classic mistake of starting a project, realising there is some brick walls they can't overcome and just forget about it. I know you can always rehost future project on your paid hosting but it's just a waste of cash? Why not set up your site locally, maybe have a github and invite some other friends to help you, once the final product is pushed to master, create the website on free hosting. If it works and you then plan on using paid hosting, OK? But either way, before your free hosting space runs out and you need to upgrade, you should have a good few users and probably some income off of adspace to pay for the hosting anyway.

Decent Skin

donaldtramp wrote: »

Why would anyone create a website on paid hosting when you can get a free 2GB space, 100GB traffic, PHP and MySQL for free with no ads or banners?

.......you should have a good few users and probably some income off of adspace to pay for the hosting anyway.

Are you talking about people having their own ads ?

What type of a site did the OP want ? How do you know if ads are appropriate ?

Graham

donaldtramp wrote: »

Why would anyone create a website on paid hosting when you can get a free 2GB space, 100GB traffic, PHP and MySQL for free with no ads or banners?

Most 'free' hosting is worth exactly what you pay for it. Throttled bandwidth, crappy connectivity, zero SLAs and a memory/processor allocation that's just about sufficient to process your php 4 'hello world' script.

If your business/operation/time/learning is worth so little that you can't spring for a $5/month VPS, it might be worth having a rethink.

Decent Skin

donaldtramp wrote: »

Anyone with have a brain and a keyboard can optimize SEO enough to have a few solid keywords.

Except for the fact that Google ignores keywords and requires semantic markup, headers and content to substantiate that the site deserves to be ranked based on same.

donaldtramp wrote: »

I know the "spam SEO" thing was big like 10 years ago and can land you a penalty nowadays but I'm still a fan of it.

You're a fan of something that can land you a penalty ?

donaldtramp wrote: »

Backlinks of course is the way to go though, you can pay people on Fiverr for backlinks, pretty sure backlinks from .edu domains are worth the most in terms of the "Google Leaderboard", lets be honest, nobody cares about Bing.

Backlinks from authoritative sites can help a little, but it's by no means the be-all and end-all or "of course the way to go", and sites that "you can pay people" for links would generally be non-authoritative and therefore fairly useless.

donaldtramp

Decent Skin wrote: »

Are you talking about people having their own ads ?

What type of a site did the OP want ? How do you know if ads are appropriate ?

Depends on what you're doing. But by the time you run out of bandwidth you should have made enough money to purchase 'good' hosting. Why bother wasting money if nobody even likes the site.

donaldtramp

Graham wrote: »

Most 'free' hosting is worth exactly what you pay for it. Throttled bandwidth, crappy connectivity, zero SLAs and a memory/processor allocation that's just about sufficient to process your php 4 'hello world' script.

If your business/operation/time/learning is worth so little that you can't spring for a $5/month VPS, it might be worth having a rethink.

Of course I'm not recommending it for longtime as I'm not a cretin. But then again, I'm not a cretin so I wouldn't pay for web hosting before actually setting the whole site up.

Trial it on free web hosting, make a tad bit of cash, invest said cash in paid hosting and don't listen to these people OP.

donaldtramp

Decent Skin wrote: »

Except for the fact that Google ignores keywords and requires semantic markup, headers and content to substantiate that the site deserves to be ranked based on same.



You're a fan of something that can land you a penalty ?



Backlinks from authoritative sites can help a little, but it's by no means the be-all and end-all or "of course the way to go", and sites that "you can pay people" for links would generally be non-authoritative and therefore fairly useless.

What you're saying really isn't true. First of all, I've spammed keywords for a very long time and I've only ever received a penalty once, so I spammed a little more and now I'm top again. I'm not sure if I'm just lucky, but hey it's worked for me so why not share my good luck. Anyway, if you want to spend hundreds then do so, but the option for spamming is there.

Again, not true. Backlinks will SEO rank you pretty good, .edu links are the best, and there are many people who would gladly put backlinks on their many websites for you and rank your site for some small money.

Decent Skin

donaldtramp wrote: »

What you're saying really isn't true. First of all, I've spammed keywords for a very long time and I've only ever received a penalty once, so I spammed a little more and now I'm top again. I'm not sure if I'm just lucky, but hey it's worked for me so why not share my good luck. Anyway, if you want to spend hundreds then do so, but the option for spamming is there.

No idea how I'd be "spending hundreds". And how or why you included the statement re semantic markup and Google ignoring basic keyword tags in your "not true" is beyond me.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html?m=1

Again, not true. Backlinks will SEO rank you pretty good, .edu links are the best, and there are many people who would gladly put backlinks on their many websites for you and rank your site for some small money.

Again, no idea how that makes what I said "not true", and if you rely on paying people for those on worthwhile sites, then you're the one who would be "spending hundreds" due to the fact that a lot of authoritative backlinks would be required.

Compared to a standard hosting package of approx €5 a month and a well-structured site, there's no contest.

donaldtramp

SEO and hosting are two different things, stop acting like having good hosting will help SEO.

1. Get free hosting, set up the site, make a small bit of cash.

2. Buy paid hosting and begin expanding.

In terms of SEO, you're suggesting just having a well structured site, that's fine, you can do that on FREE HOSTING aswell, and you can also purchase backlinks as they are pretty cheap.

Decent Skin

donaldtramp wrote: »

SEO and hosting are two different things, stop acting like having good hosting will help SEO.

1. Get free hosting, set up the site, make a small bit of cash.

2. Buy paid hosting and begin expanding.

In terms of SEO, you're suggesting just having a well structured site, that's fine, you can do that on FREE HOSTING aswell, and you can also purchase backlinks as they are pretty cheap.

How ? Selling ads ? Not always appropriate.

Also, no traffic = no ad income, so SEO is a factor.

And you suggested paying other for links that may or may not work.

The thread is about ALL aspects of setting up a website, not just hosting.

donaldtramp

Decent Skin wrote: »

How ? Selling ads ? Not always appropriate.

Also, no traffic = no ad income, so SEO is a factor.

And you suggested paying other for links that may or may not work.

The thread is about ALL aspects of setting up a website, not just hosting.

What my opinion, and clearly my opinion, as a very respected computer programmer who is renowned over and beyond the world of code, is worth more than the opinion of a semi-amateur.

Lets not let my egoless ego tower over you. Lets just speak the truth. Why bother ever setting up a website unless you plan on getting something from it. No point in just investing loads of cash in a 'project' which is all this idea of his is as of now.

Be honest, half the people who have these great plans of creating a massive website to become the next facebook, or even to make a small bit of cash on the side, are thrown in the trash can long before they write their index.html.

So, why even bother to invest 1 single cent into a project? I said firstly, develop a website locally. Host it locally and run some small tests on it. Then, do whatever you need be to get it hosted on free web hosting. Test it again, know you can host it online.

At this point you can either begin SEO work, etc and make an attempt to get your site some small traffic and some small cash (be it through ads, affiliates, etc).

Now, you can say that this has converted from a feeble project to a hopeful small-business. Now, you can up your game, NOW and only NOW is the time to invest cash on hosting, SEO and advertisement.

However, I would like to point out that domains are a must have from the get go. Make sure that the project CAN be hosted online, then park your domain over the free web hosting. Now, when you plan on changing the site over to even better hosting, take an hours downtime and just allow time for the domain to park on over your new host.

I don't see what your issue is here? Why are you encouraging newbies to go wasting their cash on hosting. Agreed. It's not much money, but it's just a stupid idea.

OP, either this guy who's telling you to purchase hosting straight away owns some hosting company (watch out for that loool) or else he's just what us poker players call, a 'fish'.

RIP you bro, you done good trying to convince someone to buy hosting lol but it's not a great idea to spend money straight away. OP, don't get involved with this type of a 'programmer' as I guarantee you he'd have you €100 down the drain with a website saying "hello world" and a .net domain.

But heyyyyyyyy atleast you know your hello_world.html file won't crash because of too much traffic!

Decent Skin

donaldtramp wrote: »

What my opinion, and clearly my opinion, as a very respected computer programmer who is renowned over and beyond the world of code, is worth more than the opinion of a semi-amateur.

Lets not let my egoless ego tower over you. Lets just speak the truth. Why bother ever setting up a website unless you plan on getting something from it. No point in just investing loads of cash in a 'project' which is all this idea of his is as of now.

Be honest, half the people who have these great plans of creating a massive website to become the next facebook, or even to make a small bit of cash on the side, are thrown in the trash can long before they write their index.html.

So, why even bother to invest 1 single cent into a project? I said firstly, develop a website locally. Host it locally and run some small tests on it. Then, do whatever you need be to get it hosted on free web hosting. Test it again, know you can host it online.

At this point you can either begin SEO work, etc and make an attempt to get your site some small traffic and some small cash (be it through ads, affiliates, etc).

Now, you can say that this has converted from a feeble project to a hopeful small-business. Now, you can up your game, NOW and only NOW is the time to invest cash on hosting, SEO and advertisement.

However, I would like to point out that domains are a must have from the get go. Make sure that the project CAN be hosted online, then park your domain over the free web hosting. Now, when you plan on changing the site over to even better hosting, take an hours downtime and just allow time for the domain to park on over your new host.

I don't see what your issue is here? Why are you encouraging newbies to go wasting their cash on hosting. Agreed. It's not much money, but it's just a stupid idea.

OP, either this guy who's telling you to purchase hosting straight away owns some hosting company (watch out for that loool) or else he's just what us poker players call, a 'fish'.

RIP you bro, you done good trying to convince someone to buy hosting lol but it's not a great idea to spend money straight away. OP, don't get involved with this type of a 'programmer' as I guarantee you he'd have you €100 down the drain with a website saying "hello world" and a .net domain.

But heyyyyyyyy atleast you know your hello_world.html file won't crash because of too much traffic!

Unbelieveably obnoxious, presumptious and 100% incorrect.

Actually laughable assumptions given my profession, reputation and experience.

Trojan

Don't feed the troll folks.

KonFusion

Locked, pending review.