5 Crucial Things To Tackle Prior to Starting Your Own Website in 2018

11 April 2018 Alex Tkachenko

Building your own website may seem to be an easy task and you can be misled by numerous articles on the internet to thinking that all you need to know is how to install WordPress.

That’s simply not true since there are a few basic things that you need to know and consider in order to understand how to make your own website.

We decided to provide you with a short, yet extensive cheat sheet that will help you to think through all the ins and outs of your future website.

‘Website in your ownership’ vs. ‘Depending on site-builder platform’

First and foremost, you need to choose the platform you want to build your website on. A few years ago you could only choose some CMS and work with it further, but as of today, we’ve got a pretty extensive list of website builders that offer you lots of options to choose from.

Did you know that we have compared the best website builders and wrote a few pretty comprehensive reviews, so you could see if it’s a gamble worth taking?

MotoCMS VS Wix: Pick Your Website Creator with Drag & Drop

WiX VS Joomla: What is Better for You?

Wix | What’s Your Best Visual Builder? The Unknown Side of the Page Editor

Have you ever played in the sandbox while being a child? Of course, you did, we all spent time like that in our early childhood. Basically, that’s the concept that stands behind the visual website builders.

Yes, it will be definitely fair to admit that it’s really great to make changes to your website and see how it looks right away. Also, visual builders give you a chance to create a fully-functional project without the need of knowing how to work with some particular CMS.

Basically, that’s the reason why we implemented the Elementor page builder to our WordPress templates. You can read more detailed review on our blog in my recent post.

Elementor Page Builder: This is Your New Must Have WordPress Plugin

I recommend you asking yourself a very simple question: do you really believe that learning how to work with a CMS is so hard that you should tolerate all the limitations that visual builders have?

Here are some key differences between the CMS and Visual builders that you should consider prior to making a choice:

CMS gives you the customization freedom that you won’t find in any visual builder as of now
Most of the builders have the subscription plans that make the choice in their favor financially irrelevant
Unfortunately, the visual builders hide a very bulky and horrible code under the hood of your website
Considering the previous statement, it makes your website slow and bad in the SEO understanding
Many builders have hidden payment walls that will strike your back right when you don’t expect it

The builders have their benefits, though. If you simply do not have a possibility and time to spend a few hours learning one of the CMS, you can choose any builder around and go for it as long as you are okay with the issues described above.

Did you know that we have our very own website builder? Moto Team constantly works on making a truly great product out of it and as of now, they did an awesome builder I truly admire!

They offer you a 14-days free trial to create and customize your website and decide whether you want to pay for it further or now. Trust me, you will not find a better option out there today!

On the other hand, you have a CMS like WordPress, Joomla or any other one that gives you a full control over your website and an opportunity customize it to your needs from the scratch.

Think about it… Do you like the freedom or the limitations? To me, the answer is obvious.

What CMS will perfectly fit your needs?

Let’s make a quick review of the options among the top CMS for websites that you have on your plate. Just make sure you understand that if you are not planning to build a regular landing page, you will need something powerful and multifunctional. This is one of the things you really need to know before making a website, without this general knowledge, you will not be able to start moving.

You have to approach it very seriously, my dear readers since the latest statistics show that more than 35% of people regret the decision they make at this point. We really wish you to be a part of that 65% of happy clients that did a good research and selected the right solution for their business.

To my opinion, WordPress is the most powerful CMS for any blog, magazine or company website. You can even build a store with the help of the WooCommerce plugin, so it really makes WP a uniquely beautiful platform.

Joomla and Drupal can be used for these types of websites, but you will have to dive a little bit deeper and higher your web-development skills prior to going with one of these two fellas.

If you are planning to build a big or huge store, you should consider the CMS that are specifically designed to work with the online store functionalities.

Have you ever asked yourself how you can start an online shop for free? Here are some key CMS for stores.

Magento is the most powerful beast among all the others. You should consider this one if you are starting an online shop that will serve millions of customers.

PrestaShop is the next contender that give you almost the same functionalities and works great for a store of any size.

You can also use Shopify if you do not want to worry about hosting and domain, it works using the subscription model. It’s up to you to decide how you want to run an online shop.

As you can see, there are many options. My personal favorite? I believe that the best CMS for a website is WordPress. If you are not sure, always go with this one and create a WordPress website, it kicks ass!

How to enrich your website with the media content

Are you a photographer of any kind? If so, let me shake your hand and congratulate, you will not have to worry about the exclusive content for your website. However, not everyone has this type of skills and has to work on getting the content somewhere.

There are plenty of pricey options where you can get unique media content for your personal project, but we are talking here about the most relevant thing for the budget of the average person.

If that’s the case and you don’t want to worry about the media content, I would say that at this point it will be really great for you to consider getting the templates with the included stock media files.

On our side we have plenty of those, you can check out our MotoCMS templates and some of our WordPress themes that include the pictures and other media files for your best convenience.

What do you plan to do with SEO?

When I tell you that website builders have some certain limitations, I do mean it. My main concern is always the SEO. This is the part of your website’s maintenance should be approached seriously. Consider it the main thing you need to be taken care of in order to ensure a bright future for your website.

You will definitely want to gain organic traffic from the search engines and develop your website into something huge.

Make no mistake, if you are planning to use the visual builder, you are shorthanded. I would compare it to the marathon and those who use the cms website builders are starting later and sometimes do not finish. The reason is that the visual builders often include many unnecessary scripts that slow down your website that.

On the other hand, starting your website with a CMS like WordPress, you will be able to optimize your website with the help of many top-notch SEO plugins. This will not help you stop worrying about it at all, but you will be feeling much better and get better results.

Who will support your website?

The last but not the least goes the support of your website. This is a tough one, cause everyone sounds very welcoming while selling you a product and offering numerous of features.

Support is something everyone needs and the reason is simple: it doesn’t matter how cool is the product, you will definitely need help at some point.

Nowadays, many marketplaces that sell templates offer very limited support plans that do not include the help with the customization or installation, for example like Envato do.

On our end we will help you to customize and solve any issue you have with any template you’ve bought from us, so make sure you take advantage of our 24/7 customer service and help center.

There is a huge chance that you will stay one on one with your problem if you use a visual builder and cannot customize a certain element of your website.

Wrapping things up

Have you checked all these things and solved them? That’s just great, it means that your journey to your very own website is almost finished and 99% of work has been performed on your side.

In case you want to dive deeper into all these questions and get more detailed answers, make sure you leave us your e-mail below and we'll send you the e-book called ‘Starting a website in 2016: What options do you have?” completely free of charge.

Save your time and nerves! Check out our free e-book and you’ll know for sure how to deal with a website customization in less than 30 minutes!