Step-by-Step Guide: How to Create a Professional Website

A professional website can simultaneously serve as a marketing tool, a store platform, a display of talent, a communication channel and an engine for branding. Essentially, it opens up the whole world to you and your business, giving you a unique platform to achieve almost anything.

In this post, we will provide a step-by-step guide that explains how to create a website and guide you through the technical details and details to build your own. We will also focus on essential branding and marketing to guarantee that your website is as effective as it is beautiful.

To create a professional website:

1. Establish strategies for your brand

2. Approaching the design

3. Prioritize usability

4. Prepare for search engines

5. Professionalize your site

6. Optimize for mobile

7. Create compelling content

8. Maintain your site

01. Lay out a strategy for your brand

Start by outlining a clear and consistent branding strategy that will impact every touchstone on your site, from the overall purpose to the guiding visual philosophy and voice. All of these should become clear as you pursue the following:

• Identify your target audience: Who are they? What demographic groups do they belong to? What do they like to do? How do they see themselves? How will your business or website affect your lives?

• Examine your competitors: Do some market research to get a sense of what your competitors are doing, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how you can create a niche for yourself in the field.

• Define your brand identity: If you had to describe your brand in three words, what would they be? What is the vision that motivates your brand? Think about the brand's personality and extract specific characteristics such as brand colors, vocabulary and style.

• Prepare consistent branding material: Now is the time to get practical and prepare the materials that will soon be displayed on your site and across other branding elements. Make sure you create your own logo, as well as images, slogans, videos, text content and more. These elements should all match your brand identity and serve your brand strategy.

02. Approaching the design

From choosing the right color scheme for your website, to creating the right layout for your website, you need to consider many aspects of professional website design. If you already know how to create a website and have some previous experience, you can build your website from a blank web page template. You can also create a professional website with Wix in the following three steps:

• Choose a template: Website templates give you a solid foundation for designing your website. There is a large selection of professional website templates for a variety of themes, styles and purposes. Whether you are creating a personal website, online store or another type of website, find the template that best suits your vision. Ideally, the one you choose will already be structured according to your needs and in line with your business goals.

• Customize your template: It's time to turn it into your own website by customizing and editing. Add all your content, including text, images, videos, links and audio. Then you define the design to suit your brand, play with color choices, page order, shapes, font choices and more. Customization can be as basic or as elaborate as you want it to be. For inspiration, take a look at this selection of striking Wix websites, created from three different templates. Notice how the original templates have been customized to result in unique, individually designed websites.

• Adjust the look: There is much more to creating a website than just choosing the best font, colors and images. You can include a variety of media features to enhance your overall aesthetics. Try adding background videos or animations to your site's design for extra movement, or parallax scrolling to create a sense of depth.

03. Prioritize usability

Your website needs to capture the attention of every potential customer, but to ensure that visitors continue to browse, you also need to provide a positive user experience. A beautiful website that does not work properly will not get you far. When creating a professional website, keep in mind these important points:

• Navigation flow: For optimal website navigation, make sure the website structure is clear and intuitive. Visitors should be able to easily navigate between pages and subpages using the main menu or internal links.

• Content hierarchy: Hierarchy is one of the seven design principles, which is why you should pay extra attention to it. Your goal is to guide visitors through your site in the order that best suits your interest. When planning your site layout, make sure that the most crucial aspects are the most prominent. Reflect this hierarchy in your design, and highlight the most important elements through size, color and placement on the page. For example, if you want people to subscribe to your service, make sure the "Subscribe" button stands out on the page. This landing page, which explains how to create a blog, clearly shows the content hierarchy done correctly, with large headlines and eye-catching buttons.

• Promoting actions: CTAs are short messages that invite visitors to act directly. They can encourage visitors to "Sign up for free", "Get yours today" or "Subscribe." In short, they tell visitors explicitly what you want them to do and make it easy for them to trust what will happen after clicking a button.

• Readability: Readability is a fundamental principle in typography. Make sure you use clear fonts and comfortable font sizes, that your text colors contrast well with the background colors, and that you have enough empty space (spaces) around the written content.

• Footer: The bottom part of your site is known as the footer of the site (the top is the headline). Footers are not immediately visible to visitors to the site, but they can be used in a variety of ways to improve usability. Consider adding your contact information to the footer, including buttons that link to social media channels. You can also display a simplified sitemap that links to all your pages, as well as a brief explanation of who you are or a disclaimer text.

04. Prepare for search engines

Getting your site to rank prominently in search results is one of the most valuable ways to increase traffic. This is why it is so important to prioritize search engine optimization (SEO) in the early stages of creating your professional website. SEO is a key part of online marketing and is a science in itself. Its key elements are:

• Keyword Survey: Put yourself in the shoes of your potential visitor or client. What questions or phrases can they search for on Google that could lead them to your site? The keywords in their searches will guide your SEO strategy. By using keyword research tools, you will be able to make an informed decision about which keywords you should target.

• Text: Every piece of text on your website, from the menu to the FAQ page, blog, footer or bio section, should be written with SEO in mind. While there are many SEO tips for boosting your site, the general idea is to find subtle and elegant ways to integrate your keywords into your site's text content without compromising on quality. Search engine search engines are smart, and they can rank you down if they think you sound too much like an ad.

• Meta tags: Search engines like Google read your metadata. It is up to you to control what they see and how they present your site in the search results. It's well worth taking the time to add custom meta tags to your site with the goal of optimizing your content and helping search engines understand what your pages contain.

• All text: Images also play a prominent role in your SEO work. Each image you upload to your site should have alternate text (alternative text abbreviation) added. Alt-text is a very short line that explains to the search engines what the image shows. In turn, this allows your images to be "found" in search results, which is why it is important to write SEO-friendly alt-text for all your images.

• Link Building: By and large, your search engine results rankings are likely to improve if you have other sites linking to your site. You can start by submitting your professional site to directories, making sure all social media profiles link to your site, and encouraging visitors to share your content as well.

Remember that SEO is a long-term process that does not end when your site is launched. You have to keep refining it over time to achieve sustainable results.

05. Professionalize Your Website

In addition to serving as the online face of your business or service, you should ask yourself how your website can further enhance your professional success. Depending on your industry or field, your website may offer a number of features that will make it more attractive to your target market:

• Planning software: Is an ideal solution for managing appointments online and helps you take orders and get payments more efficiently, as well as showcase your services in the best light.

• Online Store: Creating and managing an e-commerce website has never been easier, which includes professional features such as advanced marketing tools, secure online payments and multiple sales channels. You can start building your website from scratch or choose one of these online store templates.

• Fitness Website: When building a fitness business, you need an all-in-one solution with fitness center management software, online booking and payments, and convenient staffing and scheduling options.

• Music Website: Sell your music directly on your website with Wix, and keep 100% of the profits. You will also be able to expand your audience while maintaining total creative freedom.

• Key apps: Wix App Market has a large selection of apps that will help you reach your site's potential to the maximum. Consider, for example, a tool for tracking your visitor analytics, a countdown timer to increase sales, and sophisticated text animation to impress your visitors.

06. Optimize for mobile

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