How To Create Your Own Website
Based in Everett MA3 miles from Boston, MA
If you're a small business owner in **Boston, MA, or nearby cities**, you know how important a website is for attracting customers. But should you use a DIY website builder, or hire an **expert website designer**? Let's break down your options and show why hiring a **professional WordPress web designer and web developer** is the smartest investment.
Many business owners consider using website builders like **Wix, Weebly, Shopify, or Squarespace**. These platforms promise an easy, affordable way to build a site. While they sound great, they come with major limitations:
- Website builders provide pre-made templates, but they lack flexibility. - Customizing beyond their limits is difficult without coding knowledge. - Your website may look similar to thousands of others.
- Many DIY platforms lack proper **SEO tools**, making it hard for your business to rank on Google. - Slow-loading websites negatively impact **user experience and conversions**. - Mobile responsiveness is often lacking, hurting your Google rankings.
- Most DIY builders **lock** your website within their platform. - You **can’t transfer your website** to another hosting provider if you outgrow the platform. - If the provider shuts down, you lose everything.
- DIY websites may seem cheap, but **premium features, plugins, and eCommerce functions cost extra**. - The total cost can be higher than hiring a **professional WordPress web designer**.
- An expert builds your site with **SEO best practices**, helping you rank on Google. - Fast-loading, mobile-friendly design improves your **search engine visibility**. - **Local SEO targeting Boston, MA, and surrounding cities** helps attract customers in your area.
- DIY solutions leave you alone to fix issues—**we provide expert support**. - Regular maintenance ensures your site remains **secure, updated, and high-performing**.
If you want a **high-converting, SEO-optimized WordPress website** that helps your business grow, let’s talk!
As an **expert website designer** serving **Boston, MA, and surrounding areas**, I help small businesses create professional, high-performing websites.
You need to collect some basic information about your small business:
A logo, pictures of your products, your corporate color scheme and content (Your services and/or products description).
Usually business owners forget that they need a logo and pictures of products or services they provide, and most importantly, they need content!
Your content is key to rank high on Search Engines, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services is fundamental to get Google and other search engines to index your site and show it on search results. If you are not familiar with SEO, we will explain later, what we mean by good content.
If you have the option of buying your own domain name, ( www.yourcompanyname.com), we strongly advice you to buy it from a different company than where you bought your hosting service, like cheapdomains-dot-com or go-daddy, you won't regret it if you do.
Buying a domain from a different company means also that you would need to point that domain name to your actual servers (your hosting company), or what is the same, change the DNS servers for the ones your hosting company provides.
That's actually not really hard to do if you know what you are doing, but if you never done it before, you need to contact your domain name registrar and ask them to do it for you, they will do it gladly. But if you feel comfortable doing it yourself, every registrar website has a step by step guide to do it.
Most web design plarforms like Wix or Squarespace won't give you a choice to buy your own domain name somewhere else. Some will give you a free domain name, usually we wouldn't recommend that option because if you want to move your website out of that platform it wouldn't be easy to do so.
Now this is a longer more complicated process, but it is also a more secure path to follow if you are serious about building a strong web presence online for your small business. Wordpress is probably one of the most used and the best web platforms to build strong and professional websites.
Wordpress is easy to use and do not require you to know coding, is completely free, is completely responsive (adjusts completely to mobile device screens: Iphone, Ipad, Tablets, Laptops, Etc.) which, by the way, it's a requirement from Google guidelines.
Best way to go about building your website with Wordpress is to buy a premium theme, which usually comes with step by step instructions to install your theme and to customize it according to your needs. Usually, vendors also offer customer support and are pretty good at providing instructions when you find yourself in a situation where you don't know how to make changes to your Wordpress theme or html template or do something else.
Before you can start building your Wordpress website, you are going to need two main things:
Your domain name is basically the address of your website online, (www.your-company-name.com) and usually is composed by your company name or an abbreviation of your business name, and we often advice to also include the town where your business is located, which it will help your business to show up on search results by appearing on Google Places, previously Google Maps. Believe us, that actually will be a huge step on showing your business on search results.
Something very important to remember when buying a domain name is:
Make it short and something that people can remember easily, make it memorable and catchy!
If you read above, you will also know by now, where to buy your domain name.
A server is basically a space that you rent out on a large computer, called server, to have your website files in. Without hosting, there is no way to have your website online. There are many hosting providers like Blue-host, to mention just one and they are actually pretty affordable (something in between of $3.00 to $50.00 or more a month, but you don't need to pay more than $12.00/month)
Filezila is a free FTP program that you can use with Mac or Windows platforms.
Here is a video to help you install Wordpress on your server
We are not affiliated with any of the web hosting providers mentioned here.
