Building, Designing and Hosting a Website – Part 1
“The Crazy Accountant” and Root4Plant decided to build and own their own website … “Build it and they will come” so to speak. If you have thought about starting your own website or you’ve started a business and need a website, read on … as we share our experiences to date.
To lay out a road map for this article and make it a bit more digestible (watch out for those cookies) … we’ll break it down into a series of bite size articles.
The Why, Where & When, Who, How & the What with a twist … what was our experience & what’s next -> … more Ws than www:
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |
| Why, Where, When & Who | How | What |
| Domain ownership & registration Website Hosting | Web design – WordPress versus Shopify DIY approach to e-Commerce Web design – Astra SEO – Search Engine Optimisation Social Media approach & Affiliate Marketing | What was a success, this will take a bit more thought. Mistakes, the frustrations (e.g., content disappearing after a backup, 22/05/2023), the experience & watch outs. What’s next -> It’s a process |
Part 1
Why
Why did we want a website, the most important question that you have to ask yourself upfront, be it for a Blog, a Business or e-Commerce, the answer is critical as it will determine the “Where” and the minimum functionality that you may need, now and in the future.
This had an easy answer, we were starting our business and needed a Virtual location to call “home”. Importantly we also wanted to learn a few new skills and work on our Digital Acumen.
Where
Now this was a challenge and not as straight forward as one would assume. Being “old school” to some extent, our own website was the answer, however these days there are several options to be found in social media. A few examples,
Facebook, offering multiple useful integrations with their other IT / Social Media companies / properties at any one point in time, they own several companies in the “Meta-verse”.
Google Business, a quick and easy setup. Great integration across their product offerings and as the current dominant web-browser it cannot hurt your websites ranking and SEO “Search Engine Optimisation”.
Twitter, Instagram and even WhatsApp offer options to run your business and as they’re owned by larger companies, as noted above, they offer integration across multiple social media platforms.
As a younger Finance “Generation X’er”, I’m more familiar with websites and LinkedIn and to a lesser extent Facebook. Twitter (though some would say that I’m a “twit”), Tik Tok which sounds like “Tic Tacs” or a ticking timebomb, Instagram etc. … too much in one go and importantly would anyone of these solutions reach my targeted audience … no. Would they have to be used yes, however not in isolation.
Now the big issue and drawback, you don’t “own” the virtual real estate. If you base your business on one of the platforms, if they stop providing the service or suspend your account, you’re in a spot of bother. If your end customers use different platforms, you will have to link back to your “chosen” provider in any case.
Our decision was made, we needed our own Domain and official company e-mail addresses. When did we need this, yesterday.
Who
Domain ownership and registration
We had our Domain name in mind, quite simply our company’s name. Now we had to decide did we need a local or global domain? All roads were pointing to global and we settled on a “.Com domain”. Ok, this should be easy we can go to a Domain Registrar like Go Daddy or a local option like the service providerAfrihost in South Africa.
Not so quickly, at this point you need to consider what’s to follow, registering the Domain is critical, however from this point onwards it will have a knock-on effect. Yes, you can register your Domain with one provider and host your website with another provider, however a cleaner cut solution is to register the Domain and Host the Website with one provider, simplifying administration and keeping one contact point for support.
For various reasons we chose Bluehost for hosting and for our website design we selected WordPress, we combined the two as Bluehost are meant to be one of the best WordPress hosting platforms. They can also handle your Domain registration.
What we would learn further down the line is that you cannot register a “.za” Domain and as a result when registering a few “.za” domains we selected GoDaddy, there isn’t really anyone bigger and it’s their speciality. Price wise it also made sense.
Website Hosting
As noted above we had chosen WordPress for our website design, WordPress was chosen as it powered over 40% of the world’s websites at the time. Now with WordPress being so popular there are many hosting options out there, “Managed” and “Un-Managed” where you are responsible for updates and so forth. The “Managed” option made the most sense, we were trying something new, but that has its limits and time constraints.
We decided to go for a combination of let us call them “Eco systems”, we chose Bluehost, for several reasons and it was recommended by the WordPress team at the time. As the 2 “Eco systems” are closely aligned the integration should be seamless. Experience taught has taught us otherwise, though we suspect any other Host would have similar issues, we had chosen flexibility and choice, with that comes complexity and things that can go wrong.
Bluehost WordPress hosting would update our WordPress software (not all hosting solutions offer this), websites are backed up and there is the option of a staging site.
The sites were advertised as being optimised for speed and uptime. Additionally, they could provide e-mail hosting, domain registrations and renewals, flexibility in terms of packages and upgrades, as your site grows, so do the solutions and support available to you. We must have misread the e-mail hosting bit, though that was resolved by Microsoft.
They had “Blue” in their title, not the primary reason to select them, nevertheless a plus for us in keeping with one of our Primary Corporate colours.
They also offered a great Affiliate Marketing program, if we were going to be putting in a great deal of time and effort into developing the website and business, it was logical to potentially leverage the time invested in the process and generate an additional revenue stream.
After weighing up the costs, the flexibility, several other factors, Bluehost was the logical choice for us at the time. We enjoyed doing the research and recommend that you do the same, it’s an important decision, to get right up front.
And another thing
Included below are product affiliate links. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on one of these links.
Check out a few of our Affiliate links for examples of Affiliate Programs that we are trying out, take part in.
As an example, we’ve used Sendinblue to setup our mailing list and used Astra for our Website Design. To be crystal clear and make the different programs visible, we’ve setup a specific pages for our various Affiliate Programs, so that those programs are visible and not hidden away.
Don’t miss our Article on opening an Amazon Associate Store.
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