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WHETHER YOU’RE RUNNING A
small business, promoting
your professional work or
showcasing a hobby, your
online presence can be cru-
cial to reaching an audience.
But building that presence
can be daunting. Social
media accounts, such as
Facebook, LinkedIn and
Instagram, are a good place
to start, but a dedicated
website that gives you more
control over design, content
and features can be a pow-
erful tool.
Hiring a professional to
design and build a site for
you generally costs from
a few hundred dollars for a
simple personal page to sev-
eral thousand dollars for a
customized small-business
site. But building a website
no longer requires special-
ized skills such as coding
or graphic design, says Joe
Pollaro, a vice president at
website builder Wix.com.
Do-it-yourself services,
such as Duda, Shopify,
Squarespace, Weebly, Wix
and WordPress, make it
easy to build a website.
The services generally
allow you to focus on the
content—pages, text and
images—while they oversee
the technical aspects, such
as your domain and web
hosting, which connects
your site to the internet.
The service that will be
best for you depends onwhat you want to do with
your site. Most, including
Squarespace, Wix and
WordPress, have broad ap-
peal, while Shopify special-
izes in e-commerce, packing
in features to help you man-
age sales. Most companies
offer a free version, but
you’ll generally need to pay
$10 to $40 a month for a
service plan (websites with
a shop tend to pay on the
higher end) that gives you
access to additional storage
and features and allows you
to remove ads that the site
builder places on your pages
to promote itself.Create a domain name. To get
started, you’ll need to stake
a claim to a domain, the
URL for your website. Reg-
istering a domain name is
simple and often costs $10to $20 a year. Most website-
building services will regis-
ter a domain name for you
(and may include a free year
of domain registration).
Some services add their
name to your web address
(yoursite.sitebuildingservice
.com). In that case, for a more
polished look, cut the mid-
dleman from your URL by
using a domain registrar,
such as GoDaddy.com or
Namecheap.com. You’ll still
pay roughly $10 to $20 to
register your domain for a
year. But you may need to
jump through some hoops,
such as extending the regis-
tration by a year or paying a
fee to use the domain name
with your website builder.
And if you can’t come up
with a catchy name for your
website that hasn’t already
been taken, many sites havea search feature to scope
out an available name.Decide on a design. Before
you start adding content to
your site, choose a template
offered by the website-
building service to use as a
framework. As you consider
your options, get ideas by
visiting sites similar to the
one you’re creating. Or use
filters on the website-build-
ing service’s site to find
a template that fits your
needs. Once you’ve chosen a
template, you can customize
its look by adding images,
changing the color scheme
or moving blocks of text.
You’ll usually have the
option of editing the tem-
plate heavily. But for the
cleanest look that makes it
easy for visitors to navigate
your site, you’ll generally
want to avoid making big
changes. After you’ve set
up the basics for your site,
you can expand what you’ve
built, adding pages and fea-
tures, such as animations
and videos, an online store,
or a gallery of your work.
KAITLIN PITSKER
[email protected]How to Build a Website
With these inexpensive tools, it’s easy to create your own site.
TECH■ SAVE HUNDREDS OF
DOLLARS BY BUILDING
YOUR OWN WEBSITE
RATHER THAN HIRING
SOMEONE TO DO IT.