1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium
Welcome to Day 1 of 30 Days of Medium.
30 Days Of Medium is a 30 day challenge where I will be writing a new Medium post every single day for 30 days, to improve my writing and to build my readership here on the wonderful Medium.
You can read the other entries here:
0. 30 Days Of Medium
1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium
2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium
3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium
4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium
5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium
6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium
7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium
8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium
9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium
10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium
11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium
12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium
13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium
14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium
15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium
16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium
17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium
18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium
19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium
20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium
21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium
22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium
23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium
24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium
25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium
26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium
27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium
28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium
29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium
30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium
Hopefully this works well, if not I’m sure it won’t be the last writing challenge I undertake.
What do you need to build your own website?
I’m going to keep this post short and snappy and show you what you need to build your own website.
This post is for anyone considering starting a business, running a business, freelancing or side hustling.
A domain name
A domain name is your ‘virtual address’ on the internet and you need one to serve as your websites internet home.
Our domain name for example is — squareinternet.co
Where do I buy a domain name?
Most people push Bluehost, because of their rewarding affiliate scheme. Don’t use Bluehost. Here’s why.
I don’t think it’s right to push a sucky provider just to make a quick buck. Why not push a great provider to make a honest buck instead?
Which is I recommend you get your domain name and hosting from Siteground, who are absolutely awesome.
I use Siteground every day and their platform is great and their customer support is fantastic. The last thing you want is difficulties around your domain and hosting outside of your control (due to a poor hosting provider).
Hosting
After you’ve purchased a domain, you need to connect it to a hosting plan.
If your domain is your ‘virtual address’ on the internet, then hosting is your ‘website storage unit’.
Your hosting plan stores your website and allows it to be served to visitors across the world. As well as providing you with tools for managing the back end of your website.
Again there’s no reason to use anyone but Siteground if you have a small website. They offer the best value for money, best customer support and have dedicated WordPress hosting plans starting at £2.75 / $4.00 per month
A CMS
Once you have a domain and hosting, you need to decide on the content management system for your website.
There are three key players in the CMS space.
WordPress, Joomla & Drupal.
WordPress is the easiest to use, most affordable and most scalable.
For a detailed overview of why WordPress is the best CMS to use for your website, read my article — Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On
I also wrote a detailed post on How To Use WordPress on my blog for specifics on setting up and using WordPress.
A theme
Assuming you made the smart decision and opted for WordPress, you will need a WordPress theme to build your website using a page builder
You can view and purchase tons of themes in all shapes and sizes from Themeforest, the number one theme marketplace.
Which theme?
To save you the leg work, here are the themes that we recommend:
- Divi — one of the most popular themes on the market, with a very easy to use page builder and insane amount of functionality and content. Costing only $29 Divi makes a great starter theme to build from.
- Avada — the top selling theme of all time, with 5 star customer satisfaction, over 400,000 customers and 240 premade website designs, it’s no surprise Avada costs a bit more at $60.
- X Theme — another popular theme with a large following of users. $29.
Patience
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither was a great website.
Don’t lose patience if you can’t immediately master your theme, or the page builder it uses. It takes time.
If you can improve your skills and website incrementally every single day 1%, within 100 days your website will be twice as good as when you started.
There’s a ton of great, free content out there to help you along the way.
Our website has gone through at least 5 different variations, before we settled on a style and layout we liked. And it continues to evolve and improve every day.
Additional resources
For more reading on building and growing your WordPress website, check out these other helpful guides and videos we’ve created:
How To Build A Website — The Ultimate Guide
How To Build Your Business Website Using WordPress
Why Your Website Is Sabotaging Your Sales
Day 2
Check back in with me tomorrow for Day 2 of my 30 Days of Medium challenge.
Each day I’ll be writing fresh content on how to build, grow and scale your WordPress based business and improving my writing skills in the process.
If you’d like me to write about anything particular, leave a comment:)
You might also like this:
Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On
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