How To Start Your Own Website

Deciding on a Site

The route you take when deciding how to go about starting your website will depend on what you want, your budget and how comfortable you are building a site yourself.

There are virtually limitless options out there ranging in price and quality. Read on for information on how to decide what's right for you.

Local Business Site

For small, non-eCommerce sites.

These are probably the easiest to do. I'd recommend going with a website builder such as Squarespace or Wix. They do tend to carry a small charge, but they're dead simple to use.

These sites make it easy to get up and running quickly and it's easy to update information as you go. You can event do this from your phone.

The downside of these options is when it comes to expanding your site. Let's say you've grown to the point where you need a custom solution - perhaps to connect an online store. This is possible on some solutions, but it does get complicated once you get over a few thousand in revenue. They're just not built for it.

Small Business Site

For small, eCommerce sites.

If you know you definetely need a site then you have quite a few good options available to you. If you don't have much experience then i'd recommend taking a look at Shopify. Shopify is becoming a bit of a powerhouse in the small to mid-ranged eCommerce market. It's easy to get setup and get your business off the ground.

If you want something similar to Shopify, where it's quick to get off the ground, then consider Prestashop. Prestashop is not that well known, but it has everything built in, including a fantastic defauly theme. They've thought about everything from inventory management right through to customer services. In fact you can do returns and answer all of your customer services messages from within the back end of the system. It's so much nicer.

Finally there's WordPress with WooCommerce. WordPress powers the site - the pages you look at and the posts/news articles and WooCommerce powers the store side of things. This combo is very powerful and flexible, however it doesn't look great out of the box and you'll probably need to invest in a decent theme to get started and stand out. Unless you hire someone to build/design it for you (drop me a message if you'd like my help with that). Adding new features to Wordpress is relatively easy, which often means it's the CMS (content management system) of choice for many developers.

Medium to Large Business

If you're not an online store, then something like WordPress or Drupal is probably the way to go. If you don't need many updates to your site, then you could go down the static site route. The site you're on now is a static site. Being static, all of the files necessary to render the page are done in advance, meaning the server can load the page to you as quickly as possible. In other words - they're ridiculously fast.

Please, please, please make sure that you take care with the site that you go for. Be mindful of the extensions you install and how often you update it. Security is a risk factor you should definetely consider!

For medium to large eCommerce stores, you should consider either Prestashop, BigCommerce, or if you're really big, or expecting to become big then you could consider Magento. Be aware that Magento is powerful, but quite expensive to manage. You will hear a lot about it around the web, but I wouldn't generally recommend it other than for the largest of stores due to it's complexity and cost to do pretty much anything without a thousand extensions installed. Lots of extensions is generally a bad thing as it means increased loading times and more things that require testing every time you update it (which is fairly frequently). It can become a real headache!

Other

For anything else you would need to work with a developer to establish your needs and get the best solution. If you'd like to contact me I'll be able to suggest the best fit for your needs.