Create a site or blog independently

At first, it’s important to define:

• You need a site to realize your creative inclinations or as a hobby?
• Either you need a site to gain profit from it?

If you have selected the first variant, the problem of choosing subject disappears. The content will correspond to your interests. If you wish to create a site to monetize it in future, the subject is almost crucial.

Important to consider:

• Choose the subject that will interest a wide audience. White hamsters fan club will hardly attract many regular customers, even including the white hamsters.
• Don’t create a site/blog about everything. About everything means nothing in particular.
• Within one topic it’s better to choose a more specific segment. For example, site about earning money is more difficult to promote rather than a site on copywriting.
• Choose a subject where there is significant competition among advertisers.

Common mistakes:

• general subject chosen;
• small volume of potential customers.

Main nuances:

• it’s important to define possible profit and monetizing options;
• estimate degree of competition;
• choose a subject at least a bit interesting for you.

Let’s clear up what a semantic kernel is? It’s a list of key words and phrases by means of which a site is promoted in the famous search systems (Google, Yandex etc.).

If to describe it in general, the process will be like next. Choose the main sub-themes for your future site, specify them down to articles titles. Why do we need this? After a successful start you will have to work hard and fill the resource pages with blocks of articles, news etc. And not to be confused at that moment, you need a small plan. As soon as your site is successfully indexed and first readers appeared, you may expand your sematic kernel.

Common mistakes:

• skip this item when creating a site;
• choose highly-competitive requests for primary promotion.

Main nuances:

• accent to low-competitive requests.

Note that it’s not necessary to write down, compose, promote all alone tirelessly. If you decided to do this – good on you! But there are specialists (ceo-optimizers) who are ready to build semantic kernel and promote your site even to TOP-5 at extra charge.

We have already mentioned about planning. Yes, future site’s structure should be developed in advance. At this step we rely on common sense and practicality. Think about a resource that you could like? Where to place the menu, scroll keys and so on?

Common mistakes:

• structure is formed when writing the content.

Main nuances:

• simplicity and practicality for a user.

CMS – content management system, in other words, it’s site’s engine.

1. Free popular CMS:

• Wordpress - http://wordpress.org/
• Joomla -http://www.joomla.org/
• Drupal -https://drupal.org/

2. Paid:

• ExpressionEngine - http://ellislab.com/expressionengine

3. Self-developed management systems (made on order).

Of course, it is not the full list of available CMS, it’s just a selection of the most popular. Choosing site’s engine, consider your experience and knowledge, as well as system’s functional. And if you may supplement your knowledge with video-lessons, you would have to change the “weak” system.

If you need a blog, WordPress is considered to be the perfect CMS.

Common mistakes:

• choosing a too complicated system or CMS with insufficient functional;
• budget miscalculation.

Main nuances:

• CMS should allow creating SEO-oriented resources.

Choosing hosting is not less important than choosing site’s name. If hosting is unreliable, badly supported and do not provide a sufficient quantity of resources, search systems may just not notice your site or even ban it. To prevent this, it’s important to be very accurate when taking decision on hosting-provider.

You may choose for you both paid and free hosting. The disadvantage of the latter is that it may be unreliable.

I’ll give you a short list of sites providing such services:

• http://www.ipage.com/
• http://www.justhost.com/
• http://www.web.com/
• https://www.networksolutions.com/
• http://www.bluehost.com/

Common mistakes:

• miscalculation of necessary hosting’s capacity;
• saving on hosting.

Main nuances:

• reliability;
• sufficient capacity;
• good support.

Many future web “sharks” start their work just from this step. Firstly they choose a nice name and then collate to it the subject and other parameters. Maybe this approach can exist, but it is considered ineffective. What a domain name should be like? Easy for perception, short and recognizable. Of course, every year there are less and less names like that.

Another question that worry many users is: “Should I get a domain “with age” or not”. There is no unequivocal answer. From one side, search systems are more loyal to “old” domains, consider them trust, but from the other one, you may buy a domain that previously was banned and have negative history.

It’s better to buy a domain name together with hosting, for easier payment and work in future. All hosting companies provide the possibility to buy domains. The list of hosting companies is shown at the next step.

Common mistakes:

• unreadable or unrecognizable domain name.

Main nuances:

• simplicity;
• relation between site’s name and subject.

First impression always matters. That’s why you should be careful with site’s design. Certainly, accurate look is important. To decide how exactly your resource should look, you should “return” to the strategy. If the site or blog is aimed to acquaint users with the content and its functioning depends on “good friendship” with search systems, in this case you should not do a very catchy or intricate design. A user will come to resource’s pages to get information, not for nice pictures.

If you are oriented to social factor or advertise your product/service using your site, in this case design is important when creating the site. After visiting your resource, pleasant recalls and a wish to turn back should remain at users, and they appear if he liked:

• site’s appearance;
• site’s content.

Agree that no one will want to turn back to acid yellow pages or a site with gaudy design.

If you are not a designer, there are two ways for you: order design at specialists, fortunately, there are many contacts on the web, or use free templates.

There is always a wide base of free and paid templates for the popular CMSs.

Templates for different CMS

• http://themeforest.net/

Portal with very qualitative templates. They are paid.

Templates for WordPress.

• http://wordpress.org/themes/
• http://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-themes.php

Templates for Joomla

• http://www.joomla24.com/

Common mistakes:

• unattractive or complicate design.

Main nuances:

• usability;
• simplicity;
• feeling.

Most owners of new sites realize this step after putting the resource on hosting. But I’ll tell you a secret: before launching a site, you should have at least ten ready articles. The matter is that search systems don’t like to “arrive” to an empty site, they neither like incomplete structure.

Where to get content? You may create it by yourself. But agree that if you plan to open a large news portal, you cannot manage such volumes. In this case copywriters will help you. To hire a copywriter, it’s sufficient to register on one of the below listed freelance companies:

• https://www.odesk.com/
• https://www.elance.com/
• http://www.guru.com/

Common mistakes:

• bad re-write or copy-paste;
• launch of an empty site.

Main nuances:

• useful;
• interesting;
• SEO oriented.

This step is crucial. If you don’t realize it, all previous work is waste of time. Many people put base content on pages and every day pay less and less attention to their creature. If a site is not indexed, almost not visited or you’re just lazy, don’t give up.