So you’ve decided to make a presence on the internet for your business or profession, good for you! The fact is, the world revolves around the internet and it offers you a great way to stay connected with existing customers and build new customers.

Don’t worry, building your own website isn’t as difficult as it might seem. We know it’s overwhelming to begin with, but once you understand the steps, and reap the rewards of launching your website you’ll be thrilled.

1. The first thing you are going to need to do is come up with a name for your website. If you have an existing business, you’ll probably want to use that name. If this is a new adventure, try to come up with a name for your website that reflects what you will be selling or offering in services. This helps to target traffic to your website.

2. Next, you will need to purchase a URL. Try to get the URL to match your website name. This isn’t always possible but it is very important so be creative and do your best.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say your business name is Big Bad Dogs. So you go looking for the URL www.bigbaddogs.com but its not available.

Now it’s time to get creative. What about www.big-bad-dogs.com or www.bigbaddogs.net or… well you get the idea. It’s time to look at different spins on the URL to get something to suit your business. A good place for you to check availability of your desired website, my go to site is www.freenom.com

3. Great, you have your URL now you need to find a place to host your website. There is free hosting and commercial hosting. You may be tempted by the free, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, make sure you understand what the limitations are. Also, when you are purchasing commercial hosting make sure that they have a record of being up at least 99.5% of the time. If you need functionality like a shopping cart or auto responder, make sure that the web host offers these services. I highly recommend A2Hosting, I host all of my websites. Another popular hosting company is HostGator.

4. You now have to move on to creating your website. You might use a commercial web editor, or a free one. Almost the entire web hosting sites offers online website building using their templates. This is a great way to start, but you should realise that these online builders could be limiting, so just make sure you will be able to everything you need to do. I personally do not recommend these free builders as they are quite limited, and are not always regularly updated.

My go to web builder is Thrive Themes. I use Thrive Themes on all of my websites and highly recommend them to anyone whether they are just starting out or they have been building websites for years.

5. You are almost done. You have your URL, found a place to host, built your site, and now you need to launch it and give yourself a pat on the back for your hard work and creation. You can start to tweak and begin to learn more about keywords, and search engine optimization. You are on your way to enjoy the benefits of a website.