Do you really want a website?
At every stage in this process, as with any aspect of your business, you should be asking yourself:
What do I want to achieve?
Do you want more sales? Do you want a new place to sell? Do you want to advertise yourself and/or your services/products? Do you want an “online business card”?
Very often, the means to achieve these goals is not to pay for or to build your own website. Even if the solution is some kind of online presence, that presence need not be a private website of your own, but an account with a service like Google or Amazon or Shopify or Wix or Squarespace.
BUT, if you want to carve out your own distinctive presence online, and if you want your website to be the first thing that people find when they google your name or the name of your business, then one of the best ways to do this is by setting up your own site using free software and cheap hosting.
The free website software we use and recommend is called “WordPress”. You can create pages of content as easily as you would type into a word processor, like Word or Google Docs, hit “Publish”, and your new content will appear on the Internet on your domain for the World to see.
What is a domain?
A domain is the root of your Web address, the place where your site lives on the Internet, for example “bbc.co.uk” is a domain on the dot-co-dot-UK top level.
If you have a business in the UK, you might want a dot-co-dot-UK for it, or perhaps a dot-UK.
If you want to trade globally, you might prefer a dot-com domain, like “cnn.com”.
What do I need to start my own a website?
For your domain to be seen by your prospective customers, you need two things:
- You need to register the domain. That is, you need to pay someone £10-£15 a year to tell the domain name system where to find your business online. This is like paying someone to maintain a Post Office box for your business address.
- You need to “broadcast” your domain. That is, you need a hosting company to publish the content on your domain 24/7 for people to visit from their phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops.
To reassure your visitors that you are who you say you are, a hosting company will usually also provide your domain with a digital “certificate of authenticity”: an SSL certificate.
If you have decided to go self-hosted like this, then read the next step in our guide: “How To Choose Your Domain Name“.