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How to Create a Professional Website

After discussing with your partner, you have finally decided to create a website for your business. Not having a sufficient budget to hire a professional in the field, you decided to roll up your sleeves and try to take care of it yourself. If this is indeed the situation but you have absolutely no idea how to proceed, let me help you and explain how to achieve your goal.

If you dedicate a few minutes of your free time to me, I can tell you how to create a professional website by providing you with some useful tips for choosing both the domain name and the platform you can rely on to create and manage your website. Additionally, I will also provide you with the necessary guidelines to choose the most suitable hosting service for your needs. What do you say? Can’t wait to know more and start building your website? Then don’t hesitate any longer and dive right into the topic.

Take a seat: make yourself comfortable, take all the time you deem appropriate, and read the next paragraphs. By following the tips I am about to give you and trying to put them into practice, I assure you that you will be able to create a professional website to highlight your business in a very simple way. Happy reading and, above all, good luck!

Table of Contents

Choosing the Name and Extension

One of the fundamental steps to create a professional website is choosing the domain name and its extension (e.g., .it, .com, .org, etc.). Besides indicating the URL that users must type in the address bar of their browser to reach the site, the domain name is also crucial in building your brand.

My advice, if you are a professional in a certain field or aim to become one, is to use your first and last name (or just the last name) or the name of your company. Alternatively, you can use a fantasy name with which to build your brand over time.

Regardless of the choice you make, keep in mind that it is important to choose a domain name that is simple, short, and, above all, easy to remember.

Regarding the extension, the choice of this depends on the contents of your website: if you have pages and content exclusively in Italian and your intention is to address the Italian public, the most suitable extension for your needs is .it. If, instead, you are creating a generalist site or in English, it is better to rely on .com.

Creating a Professional Website for Free

If you are wondering whether it is possible to create a professional website for free, I believe the answer is negative. Although there are numerous services that allow you to create websites for free and obtain unlimited storage and traffic space, with the possibility of monetizing your content through the inclusion of advertising banners, my advice is to turn to paid solutions.

As previously mentioned, the name to be assigned to your blog or your website is of fundamental importance. Choosing to rely on a free service, you cannot choose the extension of your website, and the domain name is binding to the chosen service as a third-level domain is provided (e.g., www.sitename.service.com).

Costs for Creating a Professional Website

If you have decided to open your wallet to create your professional website, you will be happy to know that, at least initially, the costs can be contained. Everything you need to create your website is a web space on which to install a CMS (Content Management System).

The annual cost of hosting varies depending on the services activated and, above all, on the choice between a shared server (where multiple websites share available space and other resources of the server) and a dedicated server (a server entirely dedicated to a single customer).

Even if your goal is to attract an increasing number of visitors, initially avoid wasting money on a dedicated server (which costs over 1,000 euros/year). For newly established websites with little traffic, a shared server is sufficient. In this case, prices range from 40 euros/year to 200 euros/year (including the domain).

If you are wondering how to choose a good hosting service, in addition to reading reviews online from other users, always check that the hosting service of your interest offers an immediate support service, guarantees a 95% uptime (better if 99%), and provides SSD storage space.

To learn more, I’ll leave you some useful guides that you can read to deepen the subject.

Creating a Professional Website with Wix

Among the first solutions I recommend considering for creating your professional website is certainly Wix: a famous platform that allows you to create professional websites of every kind, complete with blogs, photo galleries, and e-commerce in just a few clicks. No programming knowledge or hassle is required: you register and can choose from 900 templates already optimized for mobile and for indexing content well on search engines (SEO).

With the AI website builder, Wix can create the most suitable website for users’ needs, including images and texts, completely automatically. Once set up, the site can be customized and expanded incredibly easily thanks to the Wix drag-and-drop editor, where you can customize, add, and remove any element with a simple click.

The basic version of the service is free and allows you to create websites with the address accountname.wixsite.com/sitename with 500MB of online storage and 1GB of bandwidth. To remove ads, use a custom domain, have access to Google Analytics, customer support, and more, paid plans start from 11 euros/month. More info available.

That said, to start creating your professional website with Wix, connect to the main page of the service, click the button to Create a Website, and register your account by filling out the form that is proposed to you or by using your Facebook or Google profiles.

Now, you need to follow the simple website creation wizard (if you want, you could skip it and do everything “manually,” but I recommend using it, especially if you are new to creating websites). Specify the purpose for which you are creating a site, click on Continue, and choose whether to create the site with the AI chatbot or do so by clicking on Set Up Without Chat.

Once you are satisfied with the result (you can preview the site in desktop and mobile versions using the icons at the top), clicking the Publish button allows you to proceed in a few seconds to its publication. Easy, right? For all the details, you can consult the official Wix website.

How to Create a Professional HTML Website

It’s not for everyone, but a professional website can also be built using HTML. In fact, a professionally made site in this way instead of with the classic CMS can confer greater authority to you or your business in the eyes of an expert.

The realization of a professional website in this manner involves the use of HTML and CSS: the former is used to create the website’s content from text to images, while the latter is for the style and design of the pages. In addition to these languages, to make the site even more professional, you may also use other languages like Javascript and PHP to create more dynamic and advanced elements.

The first thing done in creating an HTML site is to create the index.html page, which is always made up of four main tags.

  • <!DOCTYPE html> — The tag that indicates it is an HTML page.
  • <html> — This tag encloses the entire HTML page, and you can also include parameters to indicate the language and other basic information about the website.
  • <head> — Contains the page title, favicon, font, and other important information about the website’s structure.
  • <body> — Includes all the content of the page that can be seen when visited. So here are all the texts, images you see on the screen, headlines, and so on.

All tags open and close to delimit their space. For example, the tag <body> must always be closed with </body> and the closing tag always contains the slash. For all the information on how to build a site with HTML, I refer you to the guide on how to create an HTML website.

Creating a Professional Website with WordPress

The simplest solution for creating a professional website via CMS is to use WordPress, a free CMS that allows anyone, from the most experienced users to those who have no prior experience, to create websites and manage their content with ease.

If you have already purchased a hosting service following the guidelines I provided in previous paragraphs and have installed WordPress, you are ready to start building your website. If not, you can take a look at my guide dedicated to the best WordPress hosting.

The first step to creating a professional website with WordPress is to customize its graphical appearance by choosing a WordPress theme. There are thousands of themes (both free and paid), and to choose the one that best suits your needs, you need to consider several factors.

  • Performance — A good theme must consist of lightweight files that do not weigh down the website, thereby increasing page loading times.
  • Updates — It is recommended to choose a theme that is frequently updated by its developer.
  • Cost — The price is always an important consideration for purchasing a theme. However, this is not always synonymous with quality. There are paid themes with unoptimized and poorly performing code. Free themes, on the other hand, can be a viable immediate choice but do not guarantee support and updates in the long term.

Ensure that you choose a theme that is responsive (i.e., adapts automatically to every screen) and that, above all, meets your needs (for example, that it has one or more sidebars).

That said, all you have to do to choose a free theme is to access the WordPress Dashboard, select the Appearance and Themes options, and click the Add New Theme button. Once you find the theme you are interested in, click on the Details link and preview to view its demo and details, and click on the Install and Activate buttons to use it on your website.

If, on the other hand, you prefer to purchase a paid theme, I recommend relying on ThemeForest, a website that collects premium WordPress themes starting from a few tens of euros. After purchasing and downloading the theme of your interest, access your website’s WordPress Dashboard, select Appearance and Themes options, click the Add New Theme and Upload Theme buttons, select the ZIP package of the theme you purchased and press the Install Now button to install it.

After you have worked on the graphic part of your website, you are ready to publish your content, and subsequently, set up the navigation menus (you can do this from the Appearance section by selecting the Menus option). To publish a new page, click on the Pages option in the left sidebar and choose the Add New Page option, then enter its title in the Enter Title Here field and the content in the text field in the center of the page. Then click the Publish button to publish the page, and you’re done.

If your website has a section dedicated to articles (i.e., those informational contents that have a publication date and a specific topic), to add a new one, click on the Posts and Add New Post options and repeat the procedure indicated for creating a new page. To learn more about how WordPress works, I recommend reading my in-depth guide.

Creating a Professional E-commerce Website

If your intention is to create a professional e-commerce website, you should know that all the indications I provided in previous paragraphs are valid, including using WordPress, which, by adding some plugins (i.e., additional tools that enhance the native functionalities of the CMS), can also be used to create an online sales site.

Alternatively, if you prefer simpler solutions (but still professional), you can opt for services that allow you to do everything in a few clicks without any programming knowledge. Here’s everything in detail.

Shopify

Shopify: a service already used by over 1,000,000 stores worldwide that allows you to create and manage e-commerce in just a few clicks, without needing to know programming languages.

It includes unlimited products, secure unlimited hosting, free unlimited bandwidth, a free shopify.com domain name (with the possibility of changing it to a personalized one), online and SMS marketing campaigns, the Facebook sales channel to sync your products with a catalog and create marketing activities on Facebook and Instagram, and a simplified administration panel to manage orders, products, customers, payments, shipping, inventory, etc.

You can try Shopify for free for an initial trial period (no renewal obligation or payment details required), after which you can choose various paid plans starting from 21€/month.

To open a store on Shopify, go to the official site of the service and click the Start Free Trial button. Then register, activate the trial period, and you’re done. In just a few seconds, you will have access to your e-commerce management panel with all the tools on the left to manage orders, products, customers, marketing campaigns, view data analytics for sales, and so on.

Wix

Wix, the service for the simple creation of websites that I talked about before, also allows you to create complete stores to sell goods and services online.

To start your online business or begin selling the products of your physical store online, you just need to register with Wix, choose from hundreds of available templates (as previously indicated), customize the site, add products, connect a payment service provider, and configure shipping.

Once again, the creation of the site occurs through the super-simple procedure I have already illustrated, while the management of products and the entire store, along with payment and shipping systems, can be done from comfortable internal panels, which are also very intuitive and allow everything to be done in just a few clicks.

You can create the site for free, but to access the full features related to business & e-commerce, you need to upgrade to a paid Wix plan starting at 22 euros/month.

CMS

Returning to the CMS, I note that there are some specifically designed to open an e-commerce that you can consider.

  • Drupal — This is another valid open-source CMS, ideal for large online stores. As with Magento and WordPress, it allows the installation of additional tools to add new functionalities.
  • Prestashop — An open-source CMS designed specifically for creating e-commerce. It allows managing fewer items than Magento but is much simpler and more intuitive to use.
  • Joomla — Like WordPress and Drupal, Joomla is a free CMS that allows you to create both a “normal” website and an e-commerce (with the installation of additional plugins). To learn more, I’ll refer you to my guide on how to create a site with Joomla.
  • WooCommerce — A special plugin for WordPress that adds an easy-to-manage e-commerce to any WordPress site. The plugin is completely free, which is its main strength, but it is also rich in functionality.

Regardless of the site created and the platform used to do so, it is necessary to ensure that it complies with the cookie policy and data processing regulations. To address any issues in this regard, you can turn to solutions like iubenda, which offers a team of lawyers to make websites and apps compliant with regulations in multiple countries and legislation without any hassle.

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