How will current or former customers recognize you for your fantastic work? How will new customers reach out to ask for services or quotes? How will you shape the future of your business as the world gets more and more technological? With an amazing website, of course! One that provides a contact page for new customers, features great testimonials, provides an outline of services and pricing, and tells consumers about your mission statement and brand.
Why build a website?
Whether you are a seasoned expert in the gig economy, or you are just getting started in your freelance career, a website can go a long way toward professionalizing your budding business. Online shopping and research is used more and more everyday to find reliable products and services. As a freelance business operator, you want to create a website that allows you to showcase your portfolio of work, offer direct contact with new consumers, show positive client feedback on your work, and drive new sales. These are absolute must-haves for your new online presence.
However, if you are new to website design, you might not consider the value of having an integrated and reliable website hosting service like CanSpace. Hosting a website is a full-time job. Servers need to always be operational, need to have a direct power supply, and have a unique Operating System (OS) with its own quirks and command line to learn. Especially if you are a hands-on designer, the last thing you want to worry about after putting hours into your cascading style sheets (CSS), your HTML, or your backend language is whether or not you will be able to adequately host your new sites.
How do I build a website?
Typically the process of building a website has 6 steps.
- Register a Domain Name — Registering your domain name is like claiming your spot on the map of the Internet. Whatever you choose will be the URL of your website going forward.
- Find hosting — Hosting a website is an involved process and requires dedicated computing power and servers.
- Install WordPress — WordPress is a super intuitive way to design a site and get it running. Many hosting platforms, including us at CanSpace, offer one-click installs for WordPress.
- Choose a theme — The theme of your website determines its overall look and feel. Think carefully about the brand image you want to convey, and choose a theme that works well with that.
- Create Pages — Try to organize pages in a way that’s intuitive for the kinds of visitors you expect to come to your site. Some things, like an About Us page, a Contact page, and a services/products page are standard for nearly all websites.
- Add Information — Make sure the information you are adding is up-to-date, accurate, and provides value.
- Link your site on social media to drive traffic — Now that your site is built, it’s time to get your users to your page. This is where having a marketing strategy in place can help you.
There are so many opportunities for website development and many online walkthroughs for building out your new site. If you are looking for a little ease in this process, you can also look elsewhere for your design process. You can use a website builder platform like WordPress. WordPress will help you design your website with much more ease. Instead of using a command line interface (CLI) or code to integrate and design your elements, you will use a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to drag and drop and see your website develop before your eyes––it’s alive! You will be able to choose themes and more easily articulate your webpages.
But, that still leaves the pesky problem of purchasing your domain name and hosting your own website. What if you’re a marketing company that needs to host websites for other customers? I wish there was a one-stop shop that could help you do all those things at once––oh, there is!
CanSpace Solutions is a true Canadian company that offers comprehensive website hosting, domain services, reseller hosting, and even dedicated servers when you really need consistency. Your purchase of hosting service will give you access to databases, consistent servers, data on your site, all at an industry leading price! We even offer website security services included with hosting. We also offer comprehensive and complimentary website migration for their clients, using a full cPanel backup!
