I Just Bought A Domain Name Now What?

Buying a domain name is the first step towards creating your website. But a domain name isn’t enough. It is only an address that will point to your website. That address is alternative for the IP address that is often a complicated set of 2-3 digit numbers that point to a location on the World Wide Web. But once a person a types in your domain name and pressed enter, he would be redirected to your website that is stored on your web host. The host would then display the web pages designed and developed through the web browser. Therefore the next step is to buy hosting that will store the files and media that your website will be made of.

i just bought a domain now what

Once you have bought hosting for your website. It’s time for you to build an attractive website either by yourself or by someone else. The developed website has to be fast enough so that it loads quickly on any browser. You can achieve that by caching your website resources either on your server side with the help of your content management system or from the client side with the help of services like cloudflare or cloudfront.

Once the website is cached it is ready for deployment. Now customers can easily find you on the web and get exposed to services and products that you provide on the web. To make it easier for your customers to find you, you need to optimize your website for search engines and advertise on various online platforms. Of course, the optimization and marketing parts are optional but they are often necessary if you want to get noticed immediately or expect higher sales on your website in significantly less time. Let’s dive deeper into each of these sections to further understand them and find ways on how you can apply them to create your own website.

Buy Web Hosting

Web hosting is the most crucial section of the whole website development process. Without a good enough web hosting service, you can face a number of challenges that can greatly affect the outcome of your websites performance. However, there are hundreds of web hosting companies out there but only a dozen among them provide services up to the mark. Selecting the best web hosting company for your domain name is often a challenging task. You will find thousands of reviews for each web hosting company in all over the web. Therefore making the right decision becomes even more challenging. Here I will guide you on how to select the right web hosting for your requirements and suggest you some of the top ones for each type of website you may want to build.

If this is your first time building a website, you should always start from the top and most commonly used web hosting companies. Some of the most common hosting companies are Godaddy, Bluehost, Arvixe etc. I would prefer Godaddy over the other two due its user friendly interface and excellent plans along with great customer service. They help you get started as per your requirements and the plans you choose. You will find a plan for every budget and can easily get started with your website in no time. But before you select a hosting you need to figure out your requirements. Let’s figure them out now

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Basically all websites on the web can be classified into the following categories: blogs, ecommerce, corporate and custom. Blogs are the websites for authors and bloggers. They are aimed at people who would be writing a lot of content for their target audience. Ecommerce websites are meant for selling your products and services. Amazon and ebay are perfect examples of those types of websites. Corporate websites are the websites of the companies and organizations that want to showcase their skills and services or products to their customers. You may also find portfolio websites but they are just small scale versions of corporate website meant for individual creative people. And last but not the least are custom applications like Facebook and Flickr. These custom applications cannot be built by everybody and they often tend have a business model around their website. Now let’s dive into what you may want and which web hosting companies would be ideal for your requirements

If you want a blog, then most web hosting companies provide WordPress hosting. However you should always go with the most popular content management system e.g WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and host them with the companies that provide specialized services for those CMS’s. Today the most popular blogging CMS is WordPress. You can find our guide on selecting the best blog hosting company here.

If you want an ecommerce website where you can sell your products your services, WordPress would do just fine but you need a more powerful hosting solution. You would need at least 10GB of space along with at least 100GB bandwidth. As your website grows, you will have to keep upgrading your plans. Moreover, you would also need a hosting company that provides SSL for security.

If you want a corporate website, a normal web host would do but if you want a custom application built then you have to find a good web development agency to build your application. Custom applications often cost much more than blogs or even ecommerce websites.

Before buying hosting you also need to estimate the number of vistors you would be getting to your website. This would help you estimate the bandwidth cost of the type of plan you may should choose while buying your hosting. In case of any doubts you can always call the selected company’s customer service to help you select he right plan.

Also Read: How Much Does Godaddy Charge To Host A Website ?

Build Your Website

Now that you have bought your domain and hosting, you need to build your website on top of it. Otherwise everyone who visits your domain name would see a blank page or a default page setup by your web hosting company. Creating a good website is not an easy task. However the huge amount of resources available on the internet often makes it easy for anyone to build any kind of website. However if you want to do it yourself, you can choose one of the numerous website builders available on the web as they really make the designing and development easy for any user. You can also hire a freelancer or a company to build your website for you. When you hire a dedicated developer for your website you get complete control of how your website would look and therefore can get it designed anyway you want. Let’s find out more.

Get A Website Builder

The web has come a long way forward since its early ages. Now you don’t have to code any bit in order to create your website. You can easily build your website with the help of numerous online and offline website builders available on the web. However you would always need some design and graphics manipulation skills to create your webpage designs. You can buy automated website builders from major hosting companies that allow users to create their own websites with relative ease. Some of the major ones are Godaddy, Wix and Weebly. These website builders are completely automated and provide all necessary tools to create wonderful web designs. You can also choose from their existing web templates created by experts to directly build your website. However if it doesn’t match your taste you can sit down to design your website the way you want. Godaddy, Hostgator and a number of other hosting giants provide automated website builders to help their customers create awesome websites in relatively less time. Browse through these companies and observe the numerous websites created through their website builders. You will easily get the hang of it and can start designing right away.

Hire A Freelancer

If you don’t want to spend your time designing your website or if you want complicated functionalities that are not generally available from the major website builders, you will have to hire an experienced freelancer to do the job for you. Finding the right freelancers for your website development is relatively easy due to the numerous freelance websites like Guru, UpWork and freelancer.com. They provide an ideal platform for all clients and freelancers to easily build their websites without the unnecessary overhead. The websites also help you manage your client activity and freelancers deliverability with the help of automated tools that track freelancer’s performance. You can hire from the global pool of talent and can easily get your website built for relatively cheaply. Before you hire a freelancer you should always check his prior work and the existing client reviews he has received over the years. This would help you find the best freelancers available in the market.

Hire A Company

To ensure that you get the best website for your money, it is always better to go with a web development company. There are thousands of web development companies in all over the world that can help you build any kind of website without any hassles. All you have to do is provide them with your requirements and they will come up with the best options and features that should go in your website. You can find a number of web development companies on the web and also on the freelance websites. Most web development companies also help you host your website on their servers instead of hosting it on Godaddy or Bluehost or any other hosting company. This ensures that your website remains secure and gets more resources than you would generally get on the major web hosting companies. With your requirement list the web development companies can often create custom websites suited for your requirements.

Go Live

Now that your website is ready, it’s time to go live. Once your website is out there for the world to see, you need to market it among your friends and social circles. Social networks come in very handy in such situations. Once you feel that your reach is limited by the limited number of people in your social network, you can start advertising your services to be displayed to the world. Social networks and search engines are the primary ways of spreading your word through internet marketing. You can create campaigns in Facebook or google and manage them through your dashboards. You can set daily budgets and slowly see your website getting more and more visitors every day.

Creating a successful website takes a lot of work. However with a little dedication you can build a very successful website. All those websites that you see today on the web were started by people like you who were completely new to website creation once in their life. However they learnt the necessary skills and now they run quite popular and profitable websites that people from all over the world visit. You can learn further about website creation from major search engine results. Just google what you want to know and you will find someone who has written a detailed guide about it.