3 Steps You Wish You Knew to Before Building Your Own Website

Welcome! You landed on this page because you were looking for useful information about how to make your website professional. The amount of misinformation out there is outstanding, so we created this guide to help you out, in just 3 easy steps.

1. Set a Goal for Your Website

If your website serves a purpose, whether you are selling online or it is just simply a student portfolio, your website will drive you to your success. On the other hand, if there is no purpose, you are wasting your time and resources.

✓ Student Portfolio

• Short bio about what you do and why you do it
• Show off your past works
• Give clue to the visitors to contact you for an interview
• Tell visitors where they can find you besides the website
• Add case study and tips on what you do in the blog

✗ Student Portfolio

• Show off your passion
• Leave visitors clueless of how to contact you
• No image of yourself but an image of a group
• Sell your old CD directly on your portfolio site

A comparison like that may not be all of it, but you get the idea. You don't want to have one and be all, rather you'd focus on one specific goal and build your website in that direction to maximize your investment.

2. Pick a Platform

Now that you have a clear goal about what should be included on your website, you can move to the next step which is choosing the right platform to design and develop your website.

Back in the day we would recommend Wordpress, but as technology has improved, we highly recommend that you checkout website building platform like Webflow. The learning curve for Webflow is huge, but it is proportionate with the result on your website. That's not all, if you do not have any prior knowledge about web design, we suggest that you should start out with Wix or Squarespace as they have a substantial useful templates that will help you build your website super quickly.

If you do not know how your website would look like, you can find inspiration on Pinterest, Awwwards, or Behance. Once you know what you want, that is also aligned with your goal, you can proceed to develop them on a chosen platform.

Our Top Pick Website Builders

1. Webflow
2. Shopify
3. Editor X
4. Squarespace
5. Wix - If Wix is your go-to option, read more about our Wix Review)

There are hundreds of website building platforms nowadays, each of them will have some pros and cons, but the result depends on your needs and what these platform can you for you. Contact us if you are unsure of which platform to use that is the best fit with your business model.

3. Connect Domain and Launch

Once the design and development process is done, the final step is to launch your website. How can you do this? By connecting your domain name to the chosen platform. A domain name is like your home address, if you do not have one, you need to go to the council and register it. By the council, I mean Godaddy, Namecheap, Bluehost, Wix, etc.

The launch phase is the final phase to get your website online. However, it is not the end yet. Optimization is even more important than all of the above. Your initial work can never be perfect, so you will always find the need to go back and make adjustment here and there and add more content to your website.