Create a Website With Wix
Regardless of the kind of website you’re aiming to create, it’s crucial that it accurately reflects your personal or professional brand favorably. However, achieving this can be challenging; it’s fairly common to experience exhaustion during the process of developing a website, whether you’re starting from the ground up or utilizing a website builder.
TL;DR: How to Make a Website
- Determine the kind of website you aim to create
- Select a platform for building your website
- Choose a design template
- Tailor the chosen template to fit your branding
- Develop the architecture of your site
- Create the necessary pages
- Populate these pages with compelling content
- Acquire a domain name
- Conduct a final review before going live
- Market your site
- Cultivate good website upkeep practices
Determine The Kind of Website You Aim to Create
Creating a successful website starts with defining its purpose and understanding your audience. This foundation allows you to design a site that not only appeals visually but also meets your performance expectations. The structure and content of your site should directly support your objectives, whether that’s showcasing your portfolio with work samples and a clear “Contact Me” option or building an online store equipped with product listings, checkout capabilities, and potentially, print-on-demand features for monetization. Depending on your specific aims, various website formats and features should be considered to align with your intended outcomes.
Select A Platform for Building Your Website
A website builder offers a cost-effective and user-friendly way to create, design, personalize, publish, and manage a website without the need for coding knowledge. The top platforms facilitate a quick and hassle-free website launch, providing around-the-clock support and incorporating features that simplify the process of scaling your website as it grows.
Choose a Design Template
The visual layout is a critical aspect of your website, and you should dedicate ample time to explore various options before deciding on the imagery and design that align with your vision. Starting with a database of professional website templates can help narrow down the choices, whether you’re in search of portfolio templates, model portfolio examples, or templates for an online store, with a wide range of customizable options from simple to complex designs available. In planning your site, consider the appearance of competitor sites and draw inspiration from visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram to understand the fonts, colors, and web design styles that appeal to your target audience. This process should provide insight without directly imitating existing designs, ensuring your chosen visual language not only stands out but also resonates well with your intended audience.
Tailor The Chosen Template to Fit Your Branding
Creating a distinctive website begins with establishing clear branding guidelines that influence everything from site design to microcopy tone, logo placement, and button colors, ensuring it uniquely represents your personal or business brand. A simple idea map can help crystallize your vision, breaking down your brand into manageable components for tasks like logo design and image selection. A well-designed website should be visually appealing, user-friendly, and embody your brand identity, with color choices and typography playing key roles in conveying the right emotions and enhancing brand consistency. For instance, choosing a color theme on platforms like Wix allows for flexibility and alignment with your brand’s vibe, and selecting the right web fonts—whether serif, sans serif, or script—ensures readability and conveys your unique personality. Additionally, incorporating branding elements like a prominently placed logo and a favicon can add a professional touch, with tools like Wix facilitating easy customization and consistency across your site.
Develop The Architecture of Your Site
Before launching your website, ensure it’s user-friendly and easy for visitors to navigate to their desired pages by carefully planning your sitemap, the architecture blueprint that helps web crawlers and visitors understand your site structure. Optimize your navigation menu to guide users efficiently, adhering to the three-click rule for easy access to any page and consider incorporating elements like a clickable logo for a quick return to the home page or a mega menu for a more visual navigation experience. Remember to adapt your menu for mobile users to ensure clarity across devices. In Wix, setting up a menu is straightforward with their editor tools. Additionally, don’t overlook the footer—it’s valuable for adding important links and information, complementing your main navigation and enhancing the overall user experience, as per insights from Adi Huri, a product manager at WOW for Wix.com.
Create The Necessary Pages
To build your website in the Wix editor, start by accessing the Page Manager via the “Pages & Menu” icon, then use the “+ Add Page” button to include a new page, selecting a template that fits your vision. After naming your page, customize it by adding content, tweaking the layout, and refining its design. You can manage your pages by rearranging them through drag-and-drop or using the ellipsis icon for options like duplicating or hiding pages. Enhance navigation by creating dropdown menus with subpages. Remember to save your work and publish when ready. When designing, consider essential pages like an inviting homepage to introduce your brand, a shop or gallery for your products or services, a personal About page, a readily accessible contact section, and an engaging blog to boost SEO and establish expertise. Additional features like an interactive membership area, online courses, an informative FAQ page, an online booking system, and a testimonials page can further enrich your site, offering a comprehensive and professional online presence as recommended by experts like Allison Lee from Wix.com, highlighting the long-term benefits of a well-maintained blog for driving traffic and engaging potential customers.
Populate These Pages With Compelling Content
Engaging your website visitors requires optimizing and diversifying the content through text, photography, videos, animation, and more, organized effectively to enhance user experience. Consider content hierarchy to ensure key information is immediately visible, and use media features to make content digestible, as recommended by Amanda Weiner of Wix.com, highlighting the importance of clarity in offerings for visitor retention. Incorporate SEO practices to improve your site’s search engine ranking, leveraging Wix’s built-in tools for keyword research, on-page optimization, and mobile-friendliness, as emphasized by Mordy Oberstein from Wix.com, noting organic search’s role in driving traffic and sustaining long-term growth. Also, prioritize the mobile experience, catering to over half of internet users browsing on smartphones, with Google’s mobile-first indexing in mind, ensuring your site performs well on mobile devices with features like cache and lazy loading for speed, and consider converting your website into an app for enhanced mobile interaction.
Acquire a Domain Name
Choosing a domain name is a crucial step in website creation, serving as your digital address and facilitating users’ access via the Domain Name System. A domain should be memorable and unique, often incorporating your site or business name with a top-level domain extension like .com or .org. If finding the perfect name proves challenging, website name generators can offer inspiration. Registration through a domain name registrar is required to secure your domain. Consideration of the domain extension, with options ranging from .de to .fr, is important. Platforms like Wix provide free domain names with premium plans, enhancing your site’s credibility and online visibility. Following domain selection, evaluating web hosting services, from shared to cloud hosting, is essential, with Wix offering reliable hosting to ensure your site’s constant availability.
Acquire a Domain Name
When building a website from scratch, it’s crucial to avoid rushing and neglecting essential steps, as this can negatively affect your site’s performance and user experience. Start with thorough planning to define your website’s purpose, target audience, and content strategy, ensuring a cohesive site structure and a content calendar for organization. Utilize tools like Wix’s “Site Preview” mode to experience your site from a user’s perspective, testing all pages, links, and media on both desktop and mobile views for a seamless experience. Additionally, having someone unfamiliar with your project review your website can offer valuable insights into its navigation and design effectiveness. Importantly, don’t overlook SEO; thorough keyword research, optimized meta titles and descriptions, and regular creation of relevant content are fundamental for enhancing your site’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages, ensuring its long-term success.
Market Your Site
Promoting your newly live website is essential, using social media, email marketing, guest blogging, and outreach marketing to ensure it reaches your target audience and achieves your goals, such as increased traffic, engagement, or sales. Lilach Goldis from Wix.com suggests identifying the social media platforms where your audience is most active and adapting your content, like turning Instagram carousel posts into Reels, to maximize impact and drive site visits. Wix supports site promotion with tools for SEO, crucial for enhancing your site’s search engine ranking and visibility. The platform offers an SEO Assistant for personalized optimization plans, alongside advanced tools for seasoned users. Email marketing is vital for building customer relationships, allowing for professional campaign dispatch to subscribers. Blogging, powered by SEO-rich features, engages readers and improves search rankings, while advertising through platforms like Google and Facebook Ads provides immediate site visibility. Leveraging these strategies effectively promotes your website, ensuring it attracts and retains the desired audience.
Cultivate Good Website Upkeep Practices
Maintaining a website is an ongoing process akin to evolving artwork, requiring continuous updates and attention for optimal performance. Utilizing a website builder like Wix enables real-time additions and modifications, essential for thriving in a competitive digital environment. Regularly updating your site, from design to SEO strategy, ensures relevance and improved user engagement, which is critical for sustaining or increasing online store sales. Monitoring website traffic through tools like Wix Analytics provides valuable insights into visitor behavior and content effectiveness, guiding enhancements for a more user-friendly experience. Security is paramount; implementing security software and keeping the site’s software current protects against hackers and malware, with Wix offering robust security features and real-time threat detection. Additionally, regularly backing up your website, utilizing features like Wix’s Site History for automatic revisions, and the option to duplicate your site for manual backups, ensures recovery options are available, safeguarding against data loss and enabling restoration to previous versions when necessary.
None of That at Safha
Wix.com is a leading website builder and offers stellar service however it requires a huge time investment to utilize the platform to its full potential. At Safha, we eliminated most of these steps and offloaded it to AI. We make it really easy to go from 1 to 11 in mere minutes.
Summary
Creating a website with Wix involves several key steps, including defining your website’s purpose, selecting a design template, customizing it to fit your branding, planning the site architecture, creating pages with compelling content, acquiring a domain name, conducting a final review, marketing your site, and maintaining it. Wix offers user-friendly tools and features to simplify the website-building process. However, Safha offers a quicker, AI-powered alternative that streamlines the entire process from start to finish, allowing you to create a website in minutes without extensive time investment.