MotoCMS Blog

Building a New Website – Checklist and Tips for Beginners

Laura Harvsey

If you truly felt like it, you could worry until the end of time about everything that goes into building a new website. However, doing that just isn’t very constructive. A much more useful exercise would be to look at everything you could worry about and just pick the most important options to focus on.

Checklist and Tips for Building a New Website

How do you know which are the most important considerations as a new website owner? You don’t have to figure that out on your own as this guide will tell you exactly what is most important.

1. Which Web Host Should I Use?

If you’re not careful, searching for the best web host can leave you as overwhelmed as worrying about website considerations in general. That’s why it’s essential to focus on the basic aspects of web hosting to find one quickly and efficiently.

The first thing to do is to figure out your general budget. The more you can spend, the more you have to worry about certain aspects like security. Once you figure that out, you have to see which web hosts offer the best uptime and good site speed.

If you Google a hosting provider and then site speed or uptime you will be met with hundreds of testing results. These metrics will vary slightly depending on who you listen to but the general information will be relatively close.

Are you in the market for extremely cheap web hosting with few bells and whistles or can you afford the best web hosting on the market? If you compare cheap web hosting companies to more expensive ones you will see quite a difference in the services offered.

Once you narrow down your options by reviewing site speed, uptime, and your budget, you should only be left with a few options. At that point, see if they offer anything else that might be important to you. If you can’t narrow it down after reviewing your options, just flip a coin or check out comparisons through Google. The options you’re trying to decide between are going to be extremely similar at that point in the process.

2. Which CMS Should I Use?

You most likely don’t want to code your website in HTML. Nowadays, there are many options for designing your website called Content Management Systems (CMS). There are many Content Management Systems available to you and not all are created equal.

One CMS might be great for creating a simple blog while another might be great for building your eCommerce website. If you’re interested in fantastic eCommerce templates then you might use MotoCMS. If you are looking for a huge plugin library then you might go with WordPress.

It’s important to go through all of your CMS options to weigh the pros and cons of each CMS. WordPress is the most used CMS due to its versatility but other content management systems provide amazing value and more targeted experiences.

3. How am I Going to Build My Website?

There are a few options for building a website once you’ve figured out which CMS you are going to use. For this example, let’s say that we are going to use MotoCMS as our website builder. These are the options we have:

Dive in Head-First

Just like with anything else in life, you can try to learn on your own. You would just install your CMS on your web hosting account and start playing around. If you’re a hands-on learner, this could be a great way to deeply understand everything you might need to use while ignoring the tools you don’t need right away.

Building a New Website Use a Tutorial

At Moto CMS, you can use the Moto CMS tutorial to make your website in just three to five days. This option is for people who want to learn all of the most important aspects of building a website in a structured manner.

If you decide to go this route, you can conquer every “day” of training in just one day but if you want to spread it out over five days, this is what it would look like.

Hire a Web Developer

Hiring a web developer is the easiest and quickest way to get your website up and running. If you have a  budget of a few thousand dollars and are in a rush then I would suggest this. There are several ways to find a web developer such as Upwork, Craigslist, and asking around your personal network.

Even if you decide to hire a web developer, it doesn’t mean you can’t get started on your website first to get a feel for your CMS. You can even have a developer get started and you can jump in and finish off parts of your website.

4. How am I Going to Build Traffic?

Once you build a website you might be looking at your Google Search Console or other website tracking service and see that you have zero visitors. You will have to change that if you want to be a successful website owner.

There are multiple ways to get traffic to your website. The best way to go about getting traffic is to focus on one strategy and master it. The three most popular ways to increase traffic are good starting points.

There are guides to each one of these broad categories. Even within each of these categories, there are dozens of options. It doesn’t necessarily matter what you choose. The important thing is to choose one specific option and to focus on it until you see positive results.

Final Thoughts on Building a New Website

Rather than worrying about a million different directions to go in with your website, just focus on the four most important parts. Once you take care of those, you can add four more considerations to your list of worries and conquer those one at a time.