Building websites is very important for entrepreneurs and shops, and the need for a website for an enterprise, store, or company is almost unbelievable in our current era. Everyone has websites to represent their business or enterprise. Websites allow those interested in your business around the world to visit and get to know you and what you are doing, and they may request some services and purchases from your site or store.
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| How to build a website for your business |
Building websites - unlike common ones - is easy and not difficult. This is important because many employers and SMEs think that building websites is difficult and requires companies and developers to specialize in the subject, but we will see that the issue is more accessible than drinking water and you can do it yourself.
Website Development Fundamentals
We will first learn about some of the founding concepts of building and developing websites. There are some knowledge and terminology that we need to understand before we start building our website.
What types of websites can be built?
"Website" is an umbrella name for many different categories of digital presence that your activity can achieve on the web. These sites may be:
- Store locations: where you aim to display products to customers as they browse them and contact you to order a purchase, they may even order your products directly and make the payment via the same website (this is common and hypothetical). The most famous example is Amazon.
- Service sites: sites that offer services in a particular area to visitors, or help them solve some simple tasks such as converting multimedia formats, writing over the network, compressing images, etc.
- Websites to view information: Simple sites that display content in the form of articles and pages about your company or business, useful for companies that want to display their services for example to targeted visitors on the web and attract more of them to communicate with and recognize them.
- Blog sites: Blogs are sites that specialize in showcasing renewable content that may concern a particular area or several areas, blogs may be personal (i.e. only one person's affiliate and under his name) and maybe group blogs with more than one writer to publish different types of content and attract visitors.
- Content sites: websites specializing in publishing content in a range of fields. The difference between them and blogs is that blogs are often a simple, unprofessional personal effort that does not seek to spread large amounts of content or attract huge numbers of visitors, blogs often publish irregularly and in various areas, while content sites are professional and have specific frameworks, targets, and numbers you want to achieve.
- Encyclopedia Sites: Just like Wikipedia, you can make a website in a particular area to capture the entire information related to that domain.
There are many other classifications of websites and there is no room to limit them.
Is building websites difficult?
Building websites is not a difficult process contrary to what many people think.
Once you understand the fundamentals of building websites and after you build your first website, you'll find that the whole process takes no more than two hours to create a core site accessible from the network.
What takes time and effort to build websites is customization and content-building processes; you may need to change the features of the site, install some additions, post articles and pages about your company or your business to visitors, and then display them all in a beautiful way organized for visitors to interact with the site.
But this varies from one location to another and from the requirements of one company or enterprise to another. The time needed to set up a giant website with 1,000 employees, for example, is not the time needed to create a small personal blog or e-store.
Generally, the process is easy and you don't need to retain companies or drain a lot of resources and time; You can understand it and do it yourself if you want.
Web concepts
Let's find out some basic concepts about website building and the terminology you'll need.
A server is a computer that has the capabilities to host visitors and users. The server is often connected to the Internet, but servers can also operate locally offline (Local Server). You can convert your device, for example, to a local server, but it would not be appropriate to convert it to a production server (Production Server) to host your site, for example, because several technical requirements such as 24/7 connectivity, resource stability, electricity, etc., may not be available in your device.
IP Address is a web address through which a server can be accessed to browse the content of that server on that address. Just like the real addresses of each of us (neighborhood, construction number, street name, floor, home number...). IP addresses are distributed and divided between different States. A title such as 87.245.224.137 refers to Turkey, which means that the server is physically located in the State of Turkey (unless it uses a proxy broker for its work).
Domain Name is the text name from which the previous IP address can be accessed. The need arose because we don't want to remember the long IP address every time we want to open different websites from the web browser, we want easy names like google.com وyoutube. com and others. When you visit a title like google.com what happens inside your browser is that you automatically convert to an IP address like 87.245.224.137, and so you don't need to remember that long address yourself but you don't need to see it originally.
To make this, the need arose for what is known as a Domain Name System (DNS). It is the system that automatically connects domain names to the IP addresses of servers.
Hosting is a resource group that Hosting Companies often give to users to enable them to create their websites on their servers. As individuals, we don't want to rent full servers (the whole device), for example, it's expensive and very excessive for our needs, but we just want parts of that server's resources. That's why hosting companies rent out parts of their servers to users for monthly (or on-the-watch) money.
When the Internet revolution began, companies were giving you what's called Shared Hosting, a very small portion of the resources shared with several other users to allow you to host your site. Now things have evolved and there is no longer a need for shared hosting. Most people buy what is known as Virtual Private Server, which is known as VPS, and is a separate part of the server with exactly specific resources that are not directly shared with other users but are entirely dedicated to you. You can get your own $5 per month good virtual server from most hosting companies.
Content Management System, abbreviated as CMS, is an electronic server-mountable system that allows website owners to create the websites they want. Some content management systems specialize in a particular field, such as Mediaweke to create an encyclopedia, while some are general, such as WordPress, and can be used to create various types of websites. Content management systems vary between them in terms of features, speed, performance, protection, and other things that may make you prefer one over the other.
Building a website
We will now move to practical steps to build websites after we have explained the most important fundamentals of this area. If the above terms and concepts are too much on you and you want to deal with someone who is doing these works for you instead of doing them manually, you can hire freelancers via an Independent or khamsat to perform the tasks you need.
Steps to build a website
Let's quickly summarize what the steps are to build a website:
- Register with a hosting company that sells a VPS server, and create a VPS server to host the site on it.
- Registering a domain name such as Example.com, may be either from the same company or from another company, some companies sell hosting services and domain names, while some specialize in one of these two.
- Change domain name addresses (DNS) to those of the hosting company.
- Link the domain name to the server we created.
- Do any infrastructure services you want on the server (monitoring services, backup, insurance, DDoS... etc.).
- Install appropriate content management software to create our website, and the necessary credentials for it.
- Add the necessary content and customizations to the site.
It may seem like a difficult list at first glance, but with continuous practice and experimentation, the process will take no more than two hours from the first to the last. What will only take longer than this is content addition and customization processes, and these as explained vary depending on the size and objectives of your site.
Building websites with WordPress
WordPress is the most popular content management system, with over 41% of all websites controlled alone. It is a free and open source system and you can download it from its official website.
WordPress allows you to create all kinds of websites you might imagine, it's a versatile content management system. You can use them to create personal blogs, e-stores, corporate websites, service sites, and other websites.
All thanks to his Plugins and Themes system; The sheer number of tens of thousands of additions and features designed to perform different tasks makes everyone accept it because all the sites required can be easily built across it.
You can install these plugins and attributes from within your site after you set it up and configure it for work, from the control panel itself you can view and install these plugins in seconds.
Building e-shops
You can also use the WordPress system to build online stores. The popular WooCommerce addition allows you to convert your site to an online store on which you can post products and accept payments from buyers easily, which is a free addition.
There are other content management systems specializing in creating stores, such as OpenCart. It is a free and open-source system that allows you to create multiple stores for free once installed and set up to work on your server. You can also install some external additions to it for more payment methods or additional benefits generally.
All other content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla can be converted to online stores as well by installing the right plugins for them, all of which are free and open source, but the most popular option for store production is undisputed WordPress due to its fame and community size.
Building Digital Encyclopedia
Want to build an encyclopedia like Wikipedia in a specific field? Like an encyclopedia specializing in agriculture, for example, or engineering? You can do it easily too via Mediaweke; It is the content management system used to create Wikipedia itself. That is, you will use the same system to create your encyclopedia, and it will look like a very Wikipedia-like view and style.
There are other encyclopedia management systems, such as Dukowicki, the latter the size of their community is smaller but the style of dealing with them is smooth and easier in the long term, as it is simpler to manage and deal with.
All these open source systems, most of which work with PHP & MySQL, so you can simply install these reliances on your server install them and start using them directly.
The process is not difficult and it is inexpensive, and once accustomed to it it will become a very easy process to create a website.
In this article, we reviewed the most important basics of website construction and development, as we saw the most popular content management systems to create various website classifications. We reiterate that the creation of a website for your organization or store is very important in our current era, especially in the time of the coronavirus, as everyone is forced to reduce their presence abroad and be content with their digital presence.
