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People are going to suggest you use something like Shopify, which is fine, but you are always going to limit yourself if you use a system like Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, etc. There is a very obvious trade off when you pick between these services and something like WordPress. With WordPress, you will have a harder time setting your website up and getting it to run like a business website, but you will have a far more powerful tool as your website grows and your business evolves.
On the other hand, with something like Shopify, you can set your website up and running within a few hours, and you can keep it running for years before converting to a more advanced platform like WordPress. These are all considerations you need to make before you start.
Finding Your Host
As an experienced web master, you are going to know that your host is always the starting point. There are good and bad hosts. There are hosts that offer a slew of different services to make your job easier or harder, and there are hosts that have data breaches, and you find your information being passed around to Russian criminals, who apply for starting bonuses on betting sites in your name.
The host will also determine future costs, including the cost of scaling things up, and will determine things like up-time, reliability, security and so forth. Plus, some hosts make it easy to set up a WordPress website, and some make you do all the hard work yourself.
Finding Your Template
Here we have skipped the installation of WordPress or your content management system, possibly with the idea that perhaps you used a hosting service that manages your WordPress installation.
Either way, the first thing you want to do is find a WordPress theme. There are plenty of free ones to choose from, though most of them ask you to pay a premium to upgrade. Do not rush into buying the premium version because there are an eye-watering number of bad ones out there. You need to be selective about your final theme, consider the editing tools it offers, and perhaps even consider hiring a designer to create your own theme.
Building Your Website
This is really up to you, but even intermediate users and general tech-savvy people will grow to know, understand and use WordPress quickly. Over time, you will learn how to keep improving your website to make it more suitable.
The weird part is that most work is not done on the first day. Over the days, weeks and months of your website’s first launching, you will find yourself tweaking the website repeatedly to get it correct. You may increase the size of the logo in one day, install the Google Analytics plugin next week, and so forth. Over time, you will craft a better and better website, and you may even change your theme several times as your business website grows and your needs expand. This is not a bad thing.
If you desperately need things to be perfect and fully functional on launch day. For example, if you have a very popular product and are expecting a massive number of sales in your first month, then you can approach a design or development company to perfect your website more quickly. Get in touch with a company like WP Masters, and they will apply several years of updates to your website so that you won’t need to tweak your website’s design for at least two years.
You may also like: Why is Frontend Platform Crucial to Build a Future-Proof Website?
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