How To Build Your Own Website – Step 5: Bringing It Together
As we come to the last blog in this series we thought it would help to have a final recap with a few helpful hints on things to remember before and after publishing
Before publishing:
- Legal requirements: Depending on where your business is located, you may be legally required to include certain information on your website. This is usually related to key information about your company or how you handle your customer’s data. It’s important that you inform yourself about the requirements in your country.
- Most importantly, you will need a privacy policy if you are running a commercial website.
- Online stores usually also require terms & conditions as well as a refund policy.
- Install Google Analytics: Google’s web statistics tool is one of the best in class, and free too. You can use it to determine the number of visitors to your website, page views, and much more, including where your visitors are located (their country and approximate city). The most important information it provides however is the number of people who have come to your site via search engines, and the keywords they have used. Once installed, Google Analytics runs in the background and you don’t need to worry about it. Register for a free account here: www.google.com/analytics – You can find out how to install Google Analytics in the support section of our website builder.
- Create a favicon: Favicons are the small images you can see to the left of the address bar in your browser. It adds a nice personal touch to your website. They’re easy to make using a favicon generator. Upload it to your website using the favicon menu in your website builder.
Final checklist of 7 key things
- Ensure your email is set up from your control panel.
- Make sure that your contact form works properly too. The best way to do this is to test it using dummy details.
- Make sure that you’ve chosen relevant page titles and descriptions (meta descriptions). They should contain keywords that your customers would use. This information will be used by the search engines.
- Proofread your website thoroughly for grammar and spelling errors.
- Check for broken links, for example with a tool like Broken Link Check.
- Test your website on another computer/tablet/smartphone device with a different browser – there may be rendering problems that you can’t see on your own system.
- If you are selling goods and services online have you installed an SSL Certificate
After publishing your website the next step is easy. Submit your website to the search engines.
This is really easy to do. Just click on the links below and copy your website URL into the box provided.
The two main ones to consider are:
Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
Bing: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
Congratulations! You did it.
Hopefully you will now be well on your way to having your all singing and dancing website with lots of traffic coming to see what you have published.
If you’re still struggling or unsure about any part of this process and you have signed up for hosting with Netcetera, whether that’s the FREE email, DNS and Website Builder package or perhaps one of our other website hosting packages, don’t forget our technical team are available 24/7 to give help, advice and point you in the right direction.
When you’re site is live you will want to make sure that it get’s noticed. A great tool for achieving this is rankingCoach. This is a simple to use do it yourself SEO tool. It really is worth taking a look at and currently you can try it out for a full month for free. It’s the sort of tool that will make your website fly!
The most important thing is to not give up. If you’ve done it and you’re not happy with the result, don’t forget you can revisit your site, update and edit it at any time.
We’d like to thank you for reading our blogs this week and we hope you enjoy building your website and if you have chosen to host with Netcetera, we look forward to providing you with fast reliable hosting for many years to come.
Please feel free to tell your friends and colleagues about Netcetera, if you like our hosting and technical support please leave a review. We always like to hear from our clients and look at ways we can continue to make Netcetera the very best hosting provider on the planet! If you would like to leave a review please use the below button. We’d love to have your feedback and find out how you have developed your site.
Questions?
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