4 Tips To DIY Your Website (with zero experience)

The road to a DIY website

If you’ve followed along for a while, you’ll know that when I started out in business, it was with my clothing label Borne Too. After my first baby, I was looking for breastfeeding clothing that didn’t make me feel frumpy. I had little luck finding other brands I loved, so I decided to dive into manufacturing my own.

I had zero knowledge of clothing design or manufacture – I was working as a Registered Nurse in the 10 years prior to starting a business. And if you’re a nurse, you’ll know that it doesn’t get much more removed from not only the entrepreneurial world but even corporate life. I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into!

A DIY website will save you money (but not time)

If funds are tight the good news is it’s totally possible to build your own website from scratch. This website you’re on right now is evidence of that! I created this myself, with no prior experience in web design or development. I feel like I did a pretty good job, too (if I do say so myself!)

When I started in business my budget was virtually non existent because all my capital was going towards the actual clothing production. If there was an opportunity to DIY something, chances are I taught myself how to do it. In fact, I learned how to do pretty much everything myself in my business.

I couldn’t avoid needing a website, too. A big part of my small business was the need for an online presence with ecommerce store. I planned to sell my clothing online and so I started from scratch and built my own website.

WordPress FTW

After much research, I decided to build my website using WordPress. I already had a blog on the free version of WordPress so I just stuck to what I knew – and it meant I could bring my blog over easily to my new website.

In hindsight, I am still so glad I decided to use WordPress because it has a reputation as one of the best website builders for small businesses. I believe building this type of website is what helped my site rank in the top results for search engines when it came to my illustration business.

WordPress has a lot of flexibility and additional features that some of the other website builders don’t have. It is incredibly customisable and has an ecommerce function called Woocommerce.

It suits just about every type of business and as someone who often changes her mind, this was important. I felt like if I wanted to pivot in the future – which I ended up doing – my website could evolve with me.

Creating a professional website from scratch takes time

Even though building your website yourself will save money – it will likely take a lot longer than engaging a professional. There were a lot of mistakes and steep learning curves in my DIY web-building process.

It definitely wasn’t the most time-efficient way to produce a website but I have zero regrets because it taught me everything I needed to know about not only building, but maintaining my website and online store.

I learnt how to troubleshoot any errors that would arise and could easily change the look of my website as well as update copy, inventory and anything else that needed editing.

I wasn’t reliant on a web developer to help me and at any time of day I could jump on and fix whatever was causing issues or update what I needed to.

Fast forward to the future, when it came time to pivot away from my clothing business, I was able to build my new business website with ease.

These subsequent sites took less than half the time of that original clothing website because I had learned so much along the way and I had become pretty efficient in the WordPress website space.

My advice: avoid free website builders

Many rookie web developers may look to free website building options to begin with. In my opinion, if you have the money – I would always recommend a paid plan over a free plan when it comes to building your website.

Although free website builders can seem like a good idea when funds are tight – they lack the customisation features you need to create a professional-looking website and usually mean more work in the future. For example, you won’t have a custom domain name and often there’s limited ability to use your own branding and colour scheme. This tends to detract from the quality of your brand from the outset – affecting how you are perceived by your target audience. Free website builders also don’t perform as well with their SEO so the chance of your page actually showing up in search engine results is minimal to non-existent.

In saying this, free websites can still be a great starting point, especially for charities and not for profit businesses and a quick Google search will show you which are the best free website builders out there.

The difference between domain and web hosting

Securing your domain and web hosting provider is one of the first things you will need to do before you can start building your website.

I remember feeling utterly confused about the difference between a domain name and web hosting when I first looked into things.

Your domain is your www.yourbusinessname.com.au website address and you pay an annual fee for this (usually around $30 AUD)

Web hosting is how you store all your website information so that it can live on the internet. These companies often have physical spaces full of hard drive storage where all your website bits and pieces live. Hosting costs more than simply securing your domain name – usually around $200+ AUD per year.

It makes it a lot easier to purchase your domain and hosting through the same provider.

I personally use Siteground. The reason I liked Siteground was for their strong reputation and also their 24/7 help desk. There’s nothing worse than your website being down and not being able to troubleshoot it because your web host is in a different time zone and no one is available.

Siteground have really good discounts for new customers – I would highly recommend their StartUp plan for new entry-level websites. They also have a range of cost effective premium plans to suit all business types.

4 tips if you plan to DIY your website (with no prior experience)

1. Choose the right website builder for your online business

I decided to go with Divi after many months of agonising over a few different themes and comparing paid vs. free builders.

Divi is great theme because of it’s ease of use, especially for beginners. They have a massive library of pre made page templates so you’re bound to find something you like. It’s a drag and drop website builder with a real-time page editor – so you know what your web page will look like as you build it.

Plus Divi it’s responsive for mobile devices – which is probably the most important thing your theme needs. Majority of your target audience will visit your website from their phone over their laptop or desktop so it must be mobile responsive to improve user experience.

Unlike some of the other drag and drop builder platforms, Divi Pro is a one-time fee instead of a subscription. Very cost effective!

Because of Divi’s popularity, you can always find answers to questions you may have. There’s so much free info online if you get stuck on something- you can find most answers in forums and also through Elegant Themes customer support.

2. Don’t delete published web pages without redirecting first

This is a crucial step in both website design and maintenance. Holy moly I learnt this the hard way. I thought when you deleted a page from your site it was just ‘gone’ off the interwebs.

No. This doesn’t happen.

If you delete a published web page, the Googlebots continue to crawl these pages and end up throwing off a bunch of error codes. This makes for a pretty crap user experience for your website visitors and will also negatively affect your SEO ranking

Solution: I use a plugin called Broken Link Checker and another for Redirection.

This way, if you decide you want to take a page/post off your website – you redirect to another page first.

The broken link checker is great because it lets you know if any of your pages or links aren’t working and then you can redirect them to improve user experience. Plus once Google has recognised enough times that your page is redirected, it will stop listing it.

3. Work on SEO when building your web pages, not later

Being able to create pages from scratch – it’s worth doing SEO research so you know what to include on those pages to get them to start ranking on Google and get your stuff seen!

I have a free eBook: SEO Rookie, A step-by-step beginners guide to getting seen on the firs page of Google. It has everything I did to make sure my illustration biz was bumped up to the top results for web searches and in time it saw me fully booked. Grab your copy via the sign up below.

Definitely make sure you subscribe to Neil Patel for his simple, actionable SEO tips and make use of his tool Ubersuggest.

Also, I use the Yoast plugin (free) for my SEO, which prompts you as to what you need to include but it’s good to have an idea of what you should be doing, too.

4. Learn how to use the backend of your website if you outsource

After building my website myself, I learned a lot of things the hard (and long) way. I’m not sure I would recommend this if you’re time-poor. I definitely would look into a service that builds your site WITH you instead of simple having someone do it all FOR you.

The reason being, that you really need to have an understanding of the backend of your website.

Tech issues arise all the time and unless you’ve got an awesome web developer on hand 24/7 (and the money to pay for that luxury) then there’s a good chance you’re going to have to do some troubleshooting yourself.

Get your developer to run through how to use the main features in your website so you know what lives where and what it does. nOtherwise you’ll find yourself logging on and thinking WTF which leads to overwhelm and a lot of wasted time.

Some important things you’ll want to learn include:

Editing page copy.
Editing products.
Editing buttons and links.
Uploading new photos or images.
Setting up your domain email address.
How to publish blog posts
What to do if your website if down and where to find your control panel and host dashboard.