Setting up a website is now days a pretty easy task. I had no experience of web design when I set up my first website over 10 years ago. Yes it was very basic but it worked. That website is still running today and its called Estartit Holidays
Since those days website building has become much much easier and now anyone with no experience can build a beautiful looking website that looks great on a computer screen, tablet and even a phone.
So lets takes you through making a website in just a few EASY steps!
1.) Decide on your website name – personally I think this is pretty important as it tells people what your website is about. We have picked names for our website which gives people an idea of what they will see on the website. (for example http://www.theglobalpetsitters.com and http://www.villacanaholidays.co.uk) both very different websites but you get the idea of what they are about just from the name.
A good name can also help with Search Engine Optimisation (this is how you get found in google, yahoo and the other search engines people use) don’t worry we’ll cover this in SIMPLE terms in another blog once you have set up your website.
This useful web name checker can tell you whether the name you are interested in is available.
Also decide on whether you want a .com or .co.uk webname. A co.uk is probably a good idea if the website visitors you want to visit your site are going to mainly from the UK. If you are looking to attract visitors to your website from other parts of the world, then a .com would be a better option.
2.) Once you have decided on your web name and checked it is available, you are ready to build your website. Building your website has become so much easier than it ever used to be. I’m assuming you are reading this blog as you are relatively new to website building and want the easiest way to set one up.
So lets make it easy! My suggestion is to use a web building programme, not only is easy to use but its also very cheap or can even be free (I’ll explain the free option shortly). Website building programmes enable you to simply design and create your own website.
I’ve tried a few website building programmes and my first choice for designing really great website very easily is Weebly. There are others that are pretty good too. Here are a few suggestions
- https://www.weebly.com
- https://www.jimdo.com
- https://www.wix.com
- https://app.site123.com
- https://www.squarespace.com
We’ll use Weebly as its my first choice to show you what’s possible to make your own website easily.
Just to show you how easy it is take a look at https://largevillarentals.weebly.com/
This is a website I set up recently and I did it totally for FREE. I’ll show you how to set up an account and get going shortly, but just to explain how you can have a FREE website. https://largevillarentals.weebly.com/ is free because if you take a look at the webname, instead of paying for a webname such as www.largevillarentals.com, I have used Weebly’s free option which just includes the word .weebly in the webname and they allow you to have this for FREE. I explain this in a little more detail as we set up an account.
So lets set up a FREE Weebly Website!
1.) Go to the Weebly website at “www.weebly.com“. You will see an account creation form with three fields (Full Name, Email and Password), as well as a few other buttons (this includes the “Log In” button).
2.) Sign up for a Weebly account. In each field in the short account creation form to the left, type in your full name, email address and password. Be sure to write these details down so you don’t forget them next time you want to log in. Once each of these steps has been completed, click on “Sign up. It’s FREE!” You may well be asked to verify yourself once you click the sign up button (this is really simple just follow the instruction on the screen – this is just asked to make sure you are a real person).
3.) It will then ask you to choose which type of website you would like to build. You will have two options to choose from — website or website with online store. Click on the website button.
4.) Choose a theme for your site. You can do this by glancing over the options, selecting whichever one interests you the most, clicking on it and the website framework is automatically loaded for you.
So for instance if you click on the “Wag & Paws” theme above shown by the red arrow, the website framework is automatically loaded for you and will look like the below.
And now click on the “start editing” button at the top of the page.
5.) Choose a name for your website. This is where you can choose the FREE version we mentioned early (we have selected “thepetsittingcouple as our domain name).
You will be given two options “Professional Domain or Subdomain” (the bottom one “Subdomain” is the one to select for the FREE version) the .weebly.com automatically added at the end”. So for our webname it is “www.thepetsittingcouple.weebly.com “. This is the URL at which people will find your website and which you can send to people you’d like to visit your website.
If you want your own webname without the weebly.com which is the paid option “choose a Professional Domain from those listed (we would choose www.thepetsittingcouple.com) for our webname from the options.
Choose the subdomain option for the FREE version! Well done, your free webname and website are all ready for you to start working on to create your very own personal website. Click Done to finish.
Brilliant that’s it all set up and your now ready to start designing!
We’ll do a blog full of tips on how how to design a really nice Weebly website very soon, but until then have a go at dragging in elements and change them for your own text and photos using the guides below. We’ll be back soon with the second part!
Designing and editing your website. Drag elements to the box that says “DRAG ELEMENTS HERE” (these can be found under the small element boxes at the top under “W Free). You can add text to the title of a page by clicking on “My Site” and using your keyboard keys to edit the text.
Click on “Publish” when you’re satisfied with your website. Doing this will make it available to the public. You can still edit your website after it is published.
The best thing to do is to play about with the dragging of elements and keep publishing so you can see how your website is progressing.
For more resources for Weebly web design you may find the following useful
Thank you for visiting our Blog, we would really appreciate your comments, your thoughts on it, or your experiences to share and if you have any questions. There is a comment box at the end of this blog page and we will be so happy to get back to you, to answer and to give any help/advice we can.
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