Building a personal website offers a variety of benefits – including improving your personal brand and teaching you new skills.<\/p>\n
Many may believe the process is too technical or complicated for them to build their own website, but this is not the case.<\/p>\n
Between online resources and intuitive products, building a website is surprisingly achievable.<\/p>\n
There are three core elements you need for your first website: a content management system (CMS), hosting, and a domain name.<\/p>\n
Unless you build a custom website, which is not recommended for a beginner, you will need a Content Management System (CMS).<\/p>\n
While there are several options, the most popular by far is WordPress, which boasts 60.4%<\/strong><\/a> of all CMS market share.<\/p>\n The WordPress CMS is used by some of the biggest websites in the world, including \u00a0TechCrunch<\/a>,<\/strong>\u00a0The New Yorker,<\/strong><\/a> and Variety.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n It is important to note that there are two WordPress “products” – its free blogging product, WordPress.com, and its CMS product, WordPress.org. When starting your first website, you should use the latter.<\/p>\n While the WordPress.org software is free, you will need to pay for hosting and a domain name.<\/p>\n Hosting refers to the process of having your website situated on a server so that Internet users can access it. All websites must be hosted if they are to be accessible to Internet users.<\/p>\n Your domain name is the address at which your hosted website can be found – for example, MyBroadband’s domain name is “https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za”.<\/p>\n Hosting providers often include a domain name as part of their packages, so it is worth investigating this before purchasing a domain name separately.<\/p>\n WordPress has published a step-by-step plan for getting started with your website.<\/p>\n These steps are summarised as follows:<\/p>\n For further support, users can use the WordPress support resources<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and forum<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Vander Host’s Eugene van der Merwe told MyBroadband that anyone building their first personal website should keep things as simple as possible.<\/p>\n He said that you should keep in mind that you will want to update your website, and should therefore not add features that are too hard to update.<\/p>\n “Cast yourself forward six or twelve months from now and envision where you want to be with the website, but don\u2019t overdo it so that maintenance becomes a burden,” said van der Merwe.<\/p>\n He also highlighted that you should prioritise a reliable hosting solution – but thankfully the market is very competitive.<\/p>\n “When searching for a host in Google, check the ratings and reviews. Also bear in mind that you might migrate or change hosts as your demands change, so be flexible.”<\/p>\n Van der Merwe added that if you want to progress to ecommerce, an entry-level WordPress standalone hosting package combined with WooCommerce and Payfast will be very cost-effective.<\/p>\n Van der Merwe told MyBroadband that there are several things to avoid when starting a personal website:<\/p>\n Van der Merwe highlighted that many people are disheartened at the beginning of the blogging process because of how few reads they get.<\/p>\n “Rome wasn\u2019t built in a day. People who blog have put a lot of practice into it, and with enough practice you can do it too,” said van der Merwe.<\/p>\n “Unfortunately with Google it can take a while to get listed, so be patient.”<\/p>\n He also recommended that prospective personal website owners learn about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) because this will mean their website ranks even higher.<\/p>\n Building a personal website offers a variety of benefits – including improving your personal brand and teaching you new skills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341039,"featured_media":202822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[35,65908,65906],"class_list":["post-361976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cloud-hosting","tag-headline","tag-personal-website","tag-vander-hosting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361976"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341039"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361976"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":363130,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361976\/revisions\/363130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Guide to creating your website<\/h3>\n
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Keep it simple<\/h3>\n
What to avoid<\/h3>\n
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Be patient when blogging<\/h3>\n
Now read:\u00a0 All the companies listed on South Africa\u2019s A2X exchange<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"