Building a Website for Your Business: A Free Beginner's Guide

My Free Guide to Building a Website

I don’t need to tell you the importance of building a website—for freelance artists and small businesses, it's a necessity. The benefits of establishing an online presence are well worth the investment, from learning valuable hard skills to exuding professionalism. I taught myself how to build the website you are reading this blog on, and this guide aims to help ease the learning process so you don’t have to bash your head into the brick wall I did, ensuring even complete beginners can start up a digital storefront. With that said, here is my free guide to building your first website.

Section One: Identifying Your Needs

Before you start looking at options and tutorials, you need to identify the purpose of your website, which is easier said than done. The landing/home page is crucial to hooking your target audience; it should be as minimal as possible, meaning few images or animations, and immediately show what you were providing. By keeping it minimal, it will load quickly, which search engines like, in addition to a more pleasant experience for visitors. Likewise, visitors likely won’t stay very long if they don’t see the immediate purpose of your site, so put that at the very top as overtly and simply as possible.

For example, my website is a digital portfolio and a personal blog, but my purpose is to quickly inform industry professionals of my work. My landing page features my latest short film, a short biography, and a carousel of blog posts, with minimal images, and big buttons to help them see more. 

Avoid the temptation to put everything you do onto the very first page; not only is it overwhelming, but it also shows you don’t know how to prioritize your work. Additional information can be included on other pages, and those pages will be up to your needs and discretion, but at minimum, ensure you include a contact page and links to your social media as well. 

To summarize, pick an efficient landing page, a contact page, and links to your social media; this approach ensures your website serves as an efficient gateway to your business.

Section Two: Choosing a Domain Host and Design Platform

Next up, find a domain host and web design platform. A domain host is, to put it very simply, a service that lets you buy a domain on the world-wide web; think of it like purchasing a plot of land. There’s a lot of intricacies in domain hosting, which will quickly overwhelm, so personally, I chose a web design platform that offers domain packages.

A web design platform is, well, a platform that lets you build your website. If you’ve ever watched a YouTube video, you’ve probably heard of Squarespace, and other options include Wix, Blogger, WordPress, and Shopify; each one has with their own advantages and distinctions, but to keep things simple, I would just look for the best price, and offers on domains. Functionally, they all act the same, and if you’re just trying to build a basic website, it really doesn’t matter too much.

For my website, I chose Wix because it had good deals on domains, simple transfers to mobile sites, and I was familiar with its UI, and no I’m not sponsored by them; I’ve also had a lot of issues with crashes, bugs, and less-than-intuitive controls, so I can’t fully endorse them. The hard truth is that building a website is time-consuming, so get ready to waste a lot of time trying to understand the basics.

Section Three: Crafting Your First Page

So you’ve picked your web design platform, which will probably include a Content Management System (CMS); that’s just a fancy term for an Excel sheet. I’d recommend starting with a template and experimenting with it until you have a grasp of how the system works; this intuitive learn-as-you-go approach suits me personally far better than a tutorial. Now, if you don’t have a template, then you’re probably going to write the code manually, at which point you probably don’t need this blog.

Some key pointers:

• The KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) Principle - The less words, the better

• Margins - Visitors use different displays, so keep everything important in the center so it doesn’t get cut off by accident

• Headers - The top of your site, including a navigation menu and logo

• Footer - The bottom of your site, which usually includes links to more information

• Elements - A general term to describe things you can modify, such as text, images, buttons, strips, colours, patterns, etc.

• Sections - A group of elements, it pays to stay organized and group elements into sections so you can quickly select and modify what you need

• Videos - Maximum one, videos take up a lot of space and take even longer to load, so I’d recommend uploading them to YouTube or Vimeo first, then linking them to your site in a video player

• Images - Maximum three, and they should be as compressed as possible using .jpg, .webp, or .svg if you can make vector art

• Content Management System (CMS) - CMS is a dynamic sheet that you can pull information from, and resembles a lot of the function and form of an Excel sheet

• Dynamic Page - Any page that shows CMS information, like a storefront or resume. It requires extra work to ensure your templates don’t break, but in the long run, it saves a lot of time because you won’t have to redesign every time you need to change an item

• Static Page - Any page that is manually configured and designed, which is faster but less flexible to quick changes

Many of these terms won’t immediately make sense, but as you experiment with your chosen platform, you’ll build a better understanding of how they work. Generally, design a header, footer, and strong static landing page, and you’ll learn a lot from that alone.

Section Four: Understanding SEO and Sharing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a massive topic; it's a crucial component for making your website available to a wider audience. At the bare minimum, you need a concise and uniform meta title, meta description, and URL slug per page, and you need to enable page indexing. 

The meta title and description tells search engines what to show visitors, and the URL slug should match to keep the search engine from thinking you're attempting to scam people. Indexing means you're allowing search engines to save your site information into their systems so it can display them; if you don’t let your website be indexed, they won’t show up on Google. Likewise, images and videos should have alt text; search engines don’t know what an image shows, so describing them ensures it can display your logo or products when someone looks for your name. Lastly, your site should have a clear favicon, which is the little logo that displays next to the search result. 

Within these basics, there is a lot of complexity. I’d advise using tools like Google Analytics and Keyword Planner to find the most commonly searched terms for your product or service, and then integrating those into your SEO. That way, when someone searches for that popular term, it’s more likely your website will pop up.

Section Five: Implementing Dynamic Pages with a CMS

I mentioned Content Management Systems (CMS) earlier, but I really cannot stress their value enough. When I first started using Wix, I used one of their gallery Apps, and it sucked. The design was awful, loading times took forever, I couldn’t include all the information I wanted, how I wanted; and I did it because I was too lazy to learn how Wix’s CMS worked. Save yourself the headache in the future, and make a Dynamic Page as early as possible. 

Typically, and I can only provide general pointers because each platform is different, you’ll create a repeater, each element within the repeater will link to a column of the CMS, and then you configure how it repeats. Make sure you include a pagination bar and search tab. 

For example, let’s say you’re making a storefront, and you have 20 items to display. You want to display 3 items per row, and 3 rows per page, meaning 9 items per page. 

• First, make a repeater, and designate the platform to duplicate this repeater as a 3x3 grid.

• Then, add an element for each part of the item: Title, Image, Description, Price, and Tags.

• In the CMS, we’ll add our 20 items into the table, and make sure they're in columns that match the repeater.

• Finally, we match each repeater element to the CMS; Title is linked to Column A, Image is linked to Column B, Description to C, Price to D, Tags to E, etc.

Once you do this, the dynamic page should automatically populate with new items as you update and change the CMS. Is this going to be time-consuming, annoying, and probably buggy? Definitely, but in the long run, you’ll thank yourself for the effort. CMS is the backbone of modern websites, so learning that hard skill will give you some serious credibility.

Conclusion

Building a website is not easy, but it is deeply satisfying. I don’t think I could possibly explain everything you need to know in this article alone, but my goal is to provide a general guide to help you search for tutorials and resources online specific to your needs and platform. The key takeaways to prioritize fast loading speeds, simple navigation, keyword SEO integration, and the basics of CMS. It’s going to be stressful and overwhelming at the start, but everybody was once a beginner, and if you’d like more personalized advice, you can visit Buy Me A Coffee to purchase a one-on-one consultation for building a website that not only meets, but exceeds expectations.

If you enjoyed this article, you can find more of my work below! If you’d like to join the community and support my work, you can follow my social media, share this article, or donate using Google/Apple Pay via Buy Me A Coffee! Have a great day!