Are you still using WordPress or Blogger to showcase your recent photo captures, cooking recipe, vacation news and so on? Are you finding it difficult to get visitors to your blog? Do not worry, you are not alone. There are many like you who have reached to a stage where they say, “Enough of using WordPress, Blogger and other such blogs for posting stuffs…it is time for me to have my own site…” In this article, you will get to know eight simple ways on how you can create a personal website and also promote it.
Here are the eight simple steps for creating and promoting your website.
Step 1 – Look for a Web Hosting Service
A Web Hosting Service provides you the necessary infrastructure for you to create a website. It is very much necessary to look for a good web hosting service. There are lots of good web hosting service providers available in the market. There are also lots of sites that provide you good comparison on these web hosting service providers.
Now that you got your infrastructure ready, next is to look for a domain name.
Step 2 – Get a Name for Your Domain
A name says it all! It is all the more important to have a perfect domain name for your personal website. Your name must be relevant to the content that you plan to have in your personal website. Your domain name will look like www.yourdomainname.com . When the domain name is related to the content of your website, most of the search engines can easily route visitors to your website. So, the first method to promote your personal website is by having a domain name that is related to the content of your website. There are many domain name registrar’s available, GreenGeeks offers free domain registration. Once the domain name is ready, you can decide on the content next.
Step 3 – Narrow Down on the Website Content
Now, you need to decide the website content. If you are creating this website for your friends and families, well you can choose a theme for your website. Some ideas are a photo galleries, cooking, movie reviews, book reviews, travel, and so on. Keep writing down your thoughts as they flow in. Since it will be your personal website, just remember to write whatever you want to write.
Step 4 – Get Your Own Logo
A picture is worth thousand words! Design a logo for your own. There are lots of websites that helps you to design your own logo. You can use some free tools such as gimp, inkscape and so on to create your own logo. If you are proficient is creating your own logo, great! Else it will be good to use these free design logo websites and design your own logo.
Step 5 – Create Your Own Pages
So far, you have done all the background work for your personal website. Next is to start populating content for your website. Use any Web-publishing tool to create pages for your website. Make sure that you create a home page (save it as .html) and few other related pages such as Profile, Biography, Contact and so on. Try to add some good images in all the pages so that your page looks attractive and keeps your reader keep coming to your website often. Make sure to save your home page as index.html.
Step 6 – Publish Your Website
Move all your pages (ftp is the common method) to the root folder of your hosting service. Go to your browser and hit your domain name,www.yourdomainname.com and there it is. You can see your home page that you had created appearing in the browser.
Step 7 – Regularly Update Your Website
Updating your personal website and keeping it up to date is the key to maintain a good personal website. You need to remember that people would come to your personal website only when you post new information. Regular updates to your personal website will keep regular visitors coming to your website.
Step 8 – Promote Your Personal Website
So, now there is new information on your personal website, how will the visitors know? Well, that is the key reason why you need to promote your personal website. You can regularly update your new information status on most of the social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Only when people know that there is new information in your website, they would visit your website.