Two decades ago the internet was still just taking its first few steps as a technology. The raucous sounds of dial-up filled the air, slow load times plagued most consumers, and everybody was figuring it out together. It was a technological wild west, but there was something comforting knowing that everyone was learning at the same time. Fast forward to 2022 and there’s a clear divide between people who spend hours online every day and people who would rather not surf for hours.
However, now more than ever people are starting websites for various reasons. To start a business, blog, or online bakery, people are striking out into the digital world to set up shop. In light of this, we wanted to offer a few tips to live by if you’re thinking of starting a site this year.
Pick A Host & Get Started
So you’ve come up with a site name and want to get started. The first thing you’re going to want to do is choose a hosting site. You can use WordPress as a simple way to take your ideas for your website and make them come to life on the screen. We suggest Host Gator as they’re reported to have fewer outages and the customer service has been rated one of the best in the industry.
Once you’ve paid for the website and have chosen a host, you’ll be able to start building out the website in your vision. We suggest you draw up a rough guideline to follow with pen and paper and base your design on a few websites that you like the look of. It might even be worth consulting a graphic designer with your ideas so they can maximize how the site reads and where the customers’ eyes will be drawn to.
“Cyber Security – Tablet” by perspec_photo88 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Protect The Customer
While we highly suggest you allow customers to create accounts on your site, be sure to give them the best security experience possible. We all know it can be difficult to sign up for a site, but making that step intuitive is important. A third of online sales are lost due to forgotten passwords. However, because we live in a society where biometric scanning is now available, customers can forget to use passwords and guard their accounts more securely.
There are a number of options for this step, but we suggest you use use CIAM to create better digital experiences and promote ease of access. If you take the hassle out of customer account management, you break a barrier in the experience as a whole and make it easier to shed light on the content of your website.
Source: Pexels
While your website should be able to speak for itself, you should also start a social media account that can pull prospective customers from other channels. If you can build a channel with a following, that will increase the scope of your viewership and get more eyes on what you want the world to see.
You just have to be sure to offer content that isn’t just recycled from your website and post close to daily. If you can post engaging content that viewers can reliably see on their feed, you’ll start to see people click through on your website and the two sides of your project will grow together.
Follow these steps and you just might have the start of something big on your hands. Be sure to check in for more tips and tricks from us in the future.
