How To Build an Online Presence

When we go on the web, we enter a whole new world -- a virtual reality that is filled with online shopping, social mingling, entertainment, education, news, work and much more. Just like a physical world, you would be enticed to visit a building that grabs your attention with pleasant aesthetics and features. Similarly, a website with an attractive design and soothing colors will prompt more visitors to check it out. Here are the steps to take to build an online presence.

Web Hosting

First and foremost, in the physical world, you need to look for the ideal real estate to house your local project, be it a small business or a hobby. For example, if you are an artisan you would be scouting out an art museum or marketplace to display your exhibits. Similarly in the virtual world, you will be looking for the perfect solution to host your website.

Web hosting solutions include shared hosting where you rent web space with many others on a web server, dedicated hosting where you rent the entire server to yourself, and cloud hosting where you get to configure your virtual server that utilizes resources across several web servers. If you are just beginning, you don't need that much virtual storage and shared hosting would be a more optimal choice due to its lower pricing and easier management.

Domain Hosting

Each website you build needs a web address. You can purchase internet domain names that are unique to your websites from domain vendors such as GoDaddy, Hostgator, and Google Domains. The most popular domains end with .com, .net and .org, however, you can choose from hundreds of fancy domain name extensions including .me, .ly, and .io.

Content Management System

Once you have decided on a web hosting plan, you will want to focus on managing your website content. You can host as many websites as your plan allows. You can use a CMS or Content Management System such as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. You can also create a static website using a predesigned web template. The difference between a CMS and a static website is that you have more control over changing content with the former. If you don't expect your content to change much over the year, you might choose to design your website using web templates.

A CMS has gained popularity over the last decades because it has room for growth depending on your needs. You can add on a lot of features to it over time and change its frontend look dynamically with professionally designed templates. Learning to manage a CMS takes time and mastery. You have the option to consult with third-party such as web development leeds who will take over the creation and management of your sites.

If you did not choose the Web hosting solution above, you can still host your website with independent web development platforms such as Wix, Strikingly, and Weebly. These vendors provide free plans with unlimited subdomain names. However, you can upgrade your plan to attach your purchased domain name to your built website.

Backup

It is important to regularly back up your websites as you don't want to lose all your effort in producing your online presence. If you are a client of a web hosting solution, your websites are usually backed up by your host, unless they exceed the storage quota set by your plan. If you patronize independent web development vendors, your websites are most likely backed up by them by default.

The last step would be to market your websites to gain visitors. This is usually done by word-of-mouth and through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Register your website address with Google, Yahoo, and Bing so that their robots will crawl your websites regularly and update their view of your websites. To gain a following takes time, but if you generate the right content with the appropriate keywords and hashtags, you might catch the world by storm.