“Growth is painful. Change is painful. But, nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong.”

–N. R. Narayana Murthy

Build your own website. It’s not as hard as you think.

You may think that your website is the most important item to build your business, but that is farther from the truth. I have purchased products and services from several businesses justfrom a landing page. However, your website is where you keep the customer engaged with your business. Here is where you offer specials introduce new products, provide updates, display portfolios about yourself of your work and the list goes on.

This is where the rubber meets the road. Depending on who you talk with you will get varied information on what to have on your website. All of the advice in this book is for the person just getting started, a business with less than $60K in annual online sales revenue, or if just doesn’t have $2k – $5k to spend on a web designer or developer or a digital marketing agency.

You can get a website built for much less, but it will not have all the marketing integrations you need to put it to use. You won’t get email marketing or eCommerce. Two must-have platforms you need to begin building an online business.

The good news is these things are very easy to build and implement and you can do it yourself and save yourself a whole lot of money.

Here are some guidelines you should use.

You can build your website without any knowledge of programming. If you have your web copy (which is all the words) and logo you are good to go, this entire process could take you less than 2 or 3 hours. If you don’t have a logo, you can find a freelancer on Fiverr who will create one for you for $5.00. I will include some tips on using Fiverr in the additional resource section. Items 1-3 should be fairly easy to do and you need to do this before anything else. Keep in mind there is nothing wrong with starting out with a text logo. You can download some free Google Fonts and with the right colors, you can create a beautiful text logo.

If you struggle somewhere along the way, just post a comment on my site or send me an email and I’ll help you along the way.

For your website, we will be using a content management system called WordPress. It’s the most popular and has the largest community of contributors and it’s free to use. It also has a one-click install. Let’s assume you already did a one-click install and move on.

Choose Your WordPress Theme

Free – $97.

Here is the fun part, your theme is a template of how your website pages will look. It keeps everything uniform by using a template to format your pages. Browse the WordPress.org repository and pick out your perfect theme. I can guarantee you can find something you like for free and you can customize it easily by just adding your own content. This is an enjoyable piece of the puzzle because here you can get creative with colors, fonts, images, and videos.

You can install and use them for free. Installing a WordPress theme is fun and easy and there are tons of tutorials on the web the best place to start for a tutorial is from the theme developer. The tutorials will even give you some ideas on customizing the theme to give it a unique look

If you know how to use a program like Microsoft Office you will not have many problems here. You can use MS Word to type up your content and then cut and paste it into a page or a post on your website.

You can use MS Publisher to create banner ads and other graphics such as logos to include your branding. I would advise using someone else for more complicated logos and ads.

Next, you will need something called WordPress plugins. Plugins are small programs that add additional functionality to your WordPress website. Such as email marketing, eCommerce, security, etc. In the resource section, I will go over a list of must-have plugins every WordPress site needs. Not to worry. Most plugins are very easy to configure and contain loads of documentation on how to use them. Not all are free, but many have a free version with limited features you can use to get started.

Note: A few hints when choosing themes or plugins.

1. Make sure the theme or plugin has been recently updated and tested with the version of WordPress you are running. I usually chose themes and plugins that the last update was no more than 6 months to a year old.

2. Using free themes sometimes have limited functionality but you can still make them work for you.

I think the last thing you need is a way to back up your website in the event of a catastrophe. Some of you like me in the beginning after I built a great-looking website I made what I thought was a small change and totally crashed my site’s database.

At the time I didn’t know how to rebuild it. Thank God today I can. For this, I like using the free services of Manage-WP. With one click back up and restore. You don’t have to worry about making mistakes as long as you back up your site regularly after making many changes.

Just test it out to make sure everything is working and in order before you back it up, you don’t want to back up your problems.

Now that we have been through the main items you will need we can get to some of the bonus material. I like to call them the extra goodies that every web designer should encourage you to do and not charge you a whole lot of money to do because they know these things are a must.

First, optimize your website for SEO. Just install a plugin like Yoast or my favorite is Rank Math. This is a big one and you can’t go wrong with this piece of the puzzle. The most important things to build your site around are keywords and SEO content.

Another thing I recommend using a website builder that allows you to create templates for your blog post. Lastly, decide what email service provider and have their plugin installed and configured on your website. if you use a website they should not charge extra for this. you will use. You can do this right now by using services like Mail Chimp or Aweber where you get free accounts that give you up to 1000 subscribers in their free version.

Lastly, always make sure that when building a WordPress site you take advantage of the free platforms available for educational purposes such as Lynda or Udemy. They offer training videos on mastering WordPress. These types of resources can save you time and money by increasing your skill level so that you build better functional websites.

Or you can just go on YouTube. YouTube is a great resource to learn how to build a website. Darrell Wilson is one of the best. But before you do that you need to create a plan and write out all your pages. That’s why I am here to help.

Check out the High-Converting-Website Program before you get started…