How to build a website - help!

[TheWayOfTheWorld]

Feel like my head is going to explode....

In the early stages of planning escape from corporate world and going solo and looking into business name, website etc.

I have been playing around on Canva designing a website but I am clueless about the next step.

• if I buy a domain name (eg from BigDaddy) how do I get my Canva-designed website published on my domain name?

I am not selling anything through the website, it is more a showcase of my expertise and services (although will imbed a "contact me" section on it).

I am googling but not getting anywhere on this

Firstly congratulations I am all for people setting up their business it is an amazing thing to do. It is a huge learning curve and the biggest self-development journey you will go on but the rewards are well worth it.

You need to get a professional web designer. I work with so many clients who have poor websites and it will impact your business.

It is not just about getting it hosted and online it is about the importance of the layout, the content and branding. So many businesses think once they have a logo and a website that is not the case.

You are better off at this stage to use social media to market your business and save up to pay for a decent website if you don't have the budget right now.

Technically if you want to carry on doing what you are doing. You need to not just pay for the website name, you need to pay for a hosting package. Which is where your website will sit. Go Daddy also offers website hosting.

To understand how you get your website designed and go live. Make YouTube your best friend. You will find thousands and thousands of videos showing how to do it.

Hope this helps a little but, but it whilst it seems like a cost at this stage it may be worth investing in a business coach because a good coach will save you a fortune in the long run.

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

@BetterCare thank you - I am definitely looking into get some sort of coach and will be looking at a branding coach/course as well.

I like designing things and, perhaps naively, think I could pull something together but have been driving myself crazy with trying to understand how the domain name/hosting/design elements all fit together.

Your site needs to sit on a hosting server.

Namecheap or a similar domain name management service will direct all traffic that's coming to your domain name to the site on your hosting server.

I've never built a website using Canva but I've built a lot of websites and I'm assuming that once you've built your site, Canva spits out a folder full of images, HTML, CSS, etc files that you can then use.

You need to get some hosting somewhere like Siteground or Bluehost. They offer server space to which you upload your website files. Usually they offer a great cheap deal for the first 3 years, then after that it's £100+ per year.

You'll set up an account there and upload your website files to it.

They also have a control panel where you can make sure your settings are correct, add an email account, etc.

You buy your chosen domain name somewhere like Namecheap or Google Domains, and set up an account there to manage the domain name settings.

You then go to your site hosting account and find out the correct name server settings for the site (eg for Bluehost it'll be something like ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com), and plug those settings into your account in Namecheap or Google Domains where it says Manage DNS.

After a few hours, typing in your domain name into a browser should open up your website.

If you want an email address that uses your domain name eg [email protected] then I'd highly recommend you open an account with Google Workspace which gives you email, and lots of other useful tools. I'm in the US and it costs $6 per month and is worth every penny.

My favourite web hosting site is cloudways.com - it'll be a bit more expensive than the others initially, but it's very easy to use, automatically sets up secure certificates, does a daily backup, etc.

You could try wix.com for an easy website design tool. But you'll still need a server as others have said.

Go to Squarespace or Wix. Its everything all in one. You can create logos, set up the g suite back end to receive your emails. You design the pages and upload the pictures and integrate it with every other platform. They also host and you buy the domain name in house. Loads of YouTubers advertise for them and one of them will have a money off voucher and free demos.

I quite often recommend Squarespace and/or Wix to clients. You still get the experience of building your own nice graphics, logos, etc, but it's a very easy way to build sites that are responsive, and you can add things like e-commerce when you're ready.

They really do a great job of ensuring you don't have to worry about all that annoying backend stuff like hosting, email addresses, domain names, etc.

FTMF30 why do you need a server if you are using a site like Wix? Does it not all happen on their servers?

- am investigating

Hi and sorry for the bump, I think you do not need a server for using wix.com

The cool thing is that you can create a free website on Wix and on Squarespace as well and then after you build a website you can pay for the paid membership. So they give you a cool option to try before buy. I found this cool website while reading an article on sitebuilder.reviews/reviews/7-best-real-estate-website-builders/ and there are more website builders mentioned but I really enjoyed Squarespace and wix. To be honest I enjoyed more squarespace as it seems more comfortable and user-friendly for me.

I made my own website on Wix, for free. It hosts it too. You can pay a subscription for the name Wix to not appear on the site... there are lots of templates to choose from so you don’t have to do any designing if you don’t want to! Good luck!

If you want more flexibility in the design, I’d recommend Wordpress, host it via siteground.

www.siteground.co.uk/web-hosting.htm

I used Wix. It was very easy and intuitive, but I used a website tutor for Boosting visibility.