Recipe: Website with Portfolio and Blog
Recipe: Website with Portfolio and Blog
Creating your own website takes creativity, clearly defined goals, research, planning, patience, and dedication. It may be at times frustrating and infuriating, but also fun and rewarding. You'll be surprised by the finished product and the realization of your vision.
Ingredients
Clear idea: your vision and goals
Content: information to share
Visuals: photos, videos
Colorful graphics: make your pages stand out
Brand image: sell yourself or your business
Instructions
Set clear goals and parameters of your project. Why do you need a website? What is it for? What’s the purpose of the site? What do you want it to accomplish? What kind of content will you share? What kind of audience are you looking for?
Research. Learn about website platforms and software. Explore types of Content Management Systems, such as Squarespace, WordPress, Weebly, Wix, Joomla, Blogspot, Typepad. Can you use a simple blogging platform, such as Blogger, Medium, WordPress.com, tumblr? If you’re using a CMS, what kind of hosting do you need: shared hosting; managed hosting like Bluehost, HostGator, SiteGround, DreamHost, WP Engine; or dedicated hosting? Look at websites you admire. What appeals to you? Gather ideas of the design/style for how you want your site to look.
Seek advice/assistance. Reach out to tech-savvy friends/family. Join topical Facebook groups where you can interact with others also learning to build their websites. You can find answers to many questions you might have by watching YouTube videos/tutorials. Once you have chosen a Content Management System provider, (i.e., Squarespace, WordPress, etc.) and a hosting company (e.g., Bluehost, HostGator) you will find support on their sites, full of detailed articles and tutorials with step-by-step instructions for learning how to build the elements of your website. You also can find answers to most any question with a simple Google search. With enough information at hand, are you ready to build your website yourself? Or do you need a professional website designer or developer to customize the perfect site to meet your needs?
Plan your content and gather material. Make an outline of what you want to include in your site. What will go on each page? If you’re selling merchandise, you’ll need photos of all your products, descriptions to accompany all your photos, copy for text sections. Do you have a logo and other imagery for branding? What information will you share? Do you have images/media to accompany the text describing your product or service? Can you write/edit your own copy? Or do you need to hire a content writer? Do you need a photographer to create new images of your products? Can you use ready-made templates? Or do your pages require custom CSS (code)?
Website basics:
Home page. This is the first impression that visitors see immediately when they land on your page. Will you use photography to grab attention? Striking graphics? What kind of navigation menu will need? A basic menu could contain sections for home, content pages, a blog, an about section, contact, and connections to your social media.
Pages. The main focus of your site. Is your site personal? Business? Are you selling something? Are you informing. Pages are static, but you can add to them as you need to.
Blog. Posts you can use to inform your site visitors. Posts are interactive, so visitors can comment and you can have a dialog with your audience.
Store/shop. The e-commerce marketing pages you’ll use to showcase your products or service.
Contact. How can site visitors get in touch with you?
Social media: Connect to your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube accounts and more.
Choose a domain name. What kind of domain name should you use? Is it a personal or business website simply using your name or your company name? Or can you come up with a catchy title that describes your website purpose in a memorable way? When you begin the process of registering your name, you’ll search the registrar to see if your domain name is available and it will come up with a list of potential top-level domain names (i.e., .com, .org, .net) and you can choose which will suit your website purpose. Finally, register your unique domain name URL with a registrar company such as Namecheap, GoDaddy, etc. The price per name registration varies depending on which top-level domain name you choose and the registration is an annual cost.
Decide on a Content Management System and hosting platform. You can choose a managed hosting company like Bluehost that runs on WordPress and you can opt to use a free domain name or use your own registered domain name. The other direction to explore is using an all-in-one website builder like Squarespace or Wix. Or a simply blogging platform such as tumblr or blogger. Pick a hosting plan – these are tiered plans based on your website needs (e.g., personal, business). Each subsequent pricing tier offers more features.
Build the infrastructure of your website. Work from the navigation menu you’ve set up to map out the corresponding individual pages that will make up the structure of the site. As a guide while you put the site together, you could make a rough drawing for yourself of how you want a page to look and an outline of what kind of pages you need.
Create it. Set up and style the pages, upload text, images. You can use templates that come with your CMS (content management system) and adapt them to your own needs. In WordPress the theme developers build in structure to the pages; in Squarespace you can start with a ready-made theme and change it easily to your needs. Or you can use blank pages and create your own look. You can also customize the page structure and content (if you have experience with code). Add hyperlinks to direct readers to connected pages on your site or to external links for more information. Style pages so they’ll be visually appealing and easy to read – add more white space to dense copy, change the page width, add details like color backgrounds or add color to headlines. Make your pages interesting, but not cluttered.
Edit the text on your content pages to make sure the language clearly conveys your purpose. Proofread. Proofread. Proofread.
Publish! Your site is live and available for visitors.
Communicate. As your site traffic grows, you’ll receive feedback from visitors that you can use to refine your pages. You can capture visitor email addresses and set up marketing campaigns to communicate with your subscriber. You’ll be able to alert subscribers to new content, new opportunities to visit your pages and turn the into regular customers.
Notes
Build your site one step at a time - Take it page by page.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes as you go.
Edit and proofread - Perfect it.
Test it (will everything work?)
Ready, set, go live.