How To Create A Website?

This article is for people who want to create a website for themselves or for their business but don’t know where to start. If you are reading this, it is most likely that you might have already seen advertisements saying that the website can be created within couple of minutes with different types of platforms/builders. But is it really that easy? This article will help you to figure out the basics of how to get started and what you need in order to create your own website.

Firstly, let’s try to divide the websites that can be created into two groups:

Informational websites (landing pages). Usually those are used for business/company presentation and contain some text + contact form. They can include media files if needed.
Websites with functionality that streamlines your business processes

- Online stores. These sites make shopping much easier and timesaving process allowing the customer to purchase all needed goods by simply pressing a couple of buttons and pay with the credit card. Moreover, such website can show all range of products/services provided by the shop in a convenient way.
- Online booking/scheduling services. These websites allow customer to do hundreds of day-to-day things (from booking a cinema ticket or hotel to scheduling appointment with the doctor) online. Like abovementioned websites it can include some general info and can be the part of online store website if needed.
- Custom online platforms designed for specific type of business (e.g. bank systems, online text/icon editors, management tools, social media platforms, etc). This type of websites is not likely to be created by non-professional as it requires special approach and knowledge to keep up with all requested non-typical functions.

Briefly, all these types of websites (except the last one) can be created by average PC-user in the presence of enough free time, dedication and ability of fast-learning. Platforms like Wix, GoDaddy, BigCommerce, etc. make this process run smoothly even if you have no website creation experience or background knowledge.

Still, there is an option to hire professional developers’ team to make your website suit every business demand. Even though this option will be more costly it will save you time and hassle.

But if you decided to take a shot and try yourself in website creation, what are the exact steps of this process?

Creating website from scratch includes different steps based on the development approach: using programming language or using the website builder. Here is the basic list of steps that have to be taken to create a website:

Determine the goal and the main business requirements of your website. If it is personal website then you have to just understand the main features that website should include.
Create a content that you’d like to have on your website. The basic ones are texts, headings, list of products, online shop pricelist, etc.
Create a suitable design for the future website and a mockup for it (Mockup is a set of screens that represents how your future website will look). Designing process includes picking colors, fonts, font sizes, creating base elements like buttons, icons, lists, etc. If you need a website for your business/company/shop, then color palette must be selected based on the audience that needs to be attracted and your company key pillars. Then you should plan your website structure (website navigation and disposition of every block on every page). Logo development and creation also belongs to designing stage of the process.
Perform development research. Based on the business requirements and mockups, select right technologies to develop the website (including website builder selection). Different technologies provide different features for different price. This is a very important step as in case development research wasn’t done properly, some work may have to be redeveloped from the beginning. It means spending more time resulting in bigger expenses.
Develop the website itself using the mockup created during the design step. This step can include writing code to create a website from scratch or simple creation a website using the website builder.
Testing your website on different devices with different screen dimensions: large monitors, small laptops, tablets, mobile devices with different screen size. The best practice would be not only to test the appearance of the website but also to perform the main use cases on all modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari.
Fix all issues found during the testing step. After fixing is completed, testing should be performed again. Both testing and fixing issues steps can be repeated a lot of times until no bugs/errors are found.
Buy a domain for your website (address of your website). You can see it in the search input of your browser:

After that you have to actually host your website (make it available in the Internet) and setup secure connection to your website (SSL). Briefly, it just makes all user data more secured and as a result makes your website look more reputable and reliable. Also with secure connection you’ll get rid of this weird screen appearing right before entering the website:

SEO optimization for your website. To cut the long story short it means to do some magic invisible changes on your website to make it shown in the top of Google (or any other) search.
In case the marketing campaign will take place – add all necessary changes to track user experience at your website.

Quite a bulk and time-consuming process, isn’t it? As soon as you are ready to handle it yourself and deal with all the nuances following these steps will bring you straight to your goal. But if you want to save your time and make your website look really professional – that’s where development specialists would be a benefit. What are the main pros and cons of hiring a professional team of developers?

If you are still reading this, then you might be really interested in creating your website and considering options for reaching your goal. Previously we found out that such options are creating the website using special platform/builder by yourself and hiring a team of specialists. In this part of the article we will try to find out what suits you the best.

Let’s take a look at disadvantages you can face when hiring the team of developers.

First, you need to understand that good development team costs money. The price depends on what country developer is from, his technology stack and his level of experience. Still, development companies of the top level always guarantee to find the best quality-price ratio.
All IT specialist skills can be divided into two categories: soft skills and hard skills. If either one of them is bad in your development team, creating a website will become a nightmare for you. Without good hard skills (usually cheap developers have bad hard skills) you won’t get the expected result: fast-working and functional website without any issues. You’ll simply get stuck at the step of fixing issues and testing again and again until you are fed up with this team. Without soft skills you won’t be able to get synergized with the developers. The will either talk to you in a very technical language, either won’t understand your business needs, either simply won’t be proactive and enterprising. So you will have to dive into a lot of technical things to be able to understand them. This can also be a problem for a customer without big experience in IT development.

One way or another, by hiring a team of specialists you entrust creative process to other people. All of us have different perception and vision of the final goal. If you are ready to try to handle the process of website design and have clear idea of how the result should look like you will most likely get closer to what you expected. Still only professionals can tell you what is real to bring into life and they certainly know better how to do it properly.

Now let’s move on to the pros of choosing professionals for creating the website for you. All of these points will be applicable only in case you hire a high qualified developer or team of developers.

Time saving. In the majority of cases you don’t even need to be involved in the process of software development. You have just to tell your idea, your requirements and that is it. During the process developers will make sure to keep you updated so you can watch your site being created step by step.
Impressive website quality. Highly experienced professionals will easily create a reliable, tested and nice-looking website.
Establishing connections with new people that can be useful for you in future. Working with known people is always better than trying to find a good specialist for each new request.
Mental health saving. Entrusting development to the highly qualified team will give you confidence that everything will be done on time and without any issues.
No need to learn the basics of website development and to struggle through numerous questions and obstacles. As we already mentioned, it can be really time-consuming and boring for some people.
Professional developer or company guarantees that their product will work without any failures. In case of any failure they should be able to fix that for free.
In the end of the process you will get unique website fully customized for your business needs that has no analogues. You will be sure that there is no website like yours/ similar to yours one.

As you can see, the result is predictable and if you really want to save your time and nerves it is better to let the professionals do the job for you.

But how to find an experienced and well-qualified team of developers? Simply contact us! Our Illitdev team grants personal approach to each client and surely will be glad to help you at least with consultation, at most with full development process.