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Five steps to build your own website: top tips to showcase yourself to the world

Zen Aug 1 2023 4 minutes

In the age of social media, you might question the need for a personal website. After all, your friends and colleagues can easily reach you through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, and it’s easy to share your photos and details about what you’re up to on those sites.

But, if the limited options given to you by social media sites aren’t enough, there are some good reasons for having a personal website too.

A personal website can allow you to be more creative in telling people about you and your interests. You’re not sharing a site with millions of other people, having to follow the terms and conditions of a service provider, and you’re not limited in the amount and format of the content you post.

A personal website can be a hub for your friends and family, or the community you’re a part of. Whether you’re sharing your content with thousands of people, a small group or just yourself, it can be a great platform to share your interests and skills or just show off about yourself. That might mean self-hosting your latest musical creations, creating a photo showcase for distant contacts or raising awareness for your favourite charity.

And your personal website – especially if you’re a writer, artist, designer or coder – can really help you to show off your abilities to prospective employers or clients.

But how do you get started in building your very own website? Here are five tips:

1) Choose a good name

A good domain name can help you to brand your site to fit your name or your interests. From cheeses-of-the-world.com to hatties-hats.co.uk, if a domain name isn’t already taken, the possibilities of what you could call your site are almost limitless. All you need to make sure of is that you register your chosen domain with a reputable provider before you get started on your website.

If you want to have a little play around with what website names are available, we’d recommend visiting our domains page here. Then just enter your chosen name – with or without spaces and hyphens – and our search function will show you a selection to choose from. There’s absolutely no obligation to buy at this stage, so you can be as creative as you like!

Bonus: That bespoke domain name can also be used to tailor your email address too! Fancy being addressed by yourname@yoursite.com? It certainly separates you from a sea of gmail, outlook, hotmail and icloud addresses.

2) Find a hosting provider

When you’ve chosen your domain name, you’ll need to sort out web hosting too. Your site will need somewhere to ‘live’, and that’s what hosting is for.

Now, as it happens, we’re rated Best Web Host by PC Pro, so it would be remiss of us not to point you to our own Zen Web Hosting service available here.

We offer a range of hosting services to suit pretty much any need – from a simple small website to multiple sites with huge amounts of storage space. If you’re just starting out on the personal website journey, you’ll likely find all you need in our Bronze package which costs just £8.39 a month.

If you’re looking for a little more detail on the question ‘what is web hosting?’, web hosting is a service that enables your website’s content to be accessible on the internet. A web hosting plan will provide you with space on a server to store all the files and data associated with your website, from photos and videos to the pages themselves. Simply put, without hosting, you have no website.

3) Have an idea

It’s good to have an idea of what you want your website to do right at the start. In other words, what is its purpose? This will help you to decide on the right look and feel.

Do you want to build a following or just keep it to you/your friends? Are you promoting a cause, sharing photos and videos, or using your site to talk about things that interest you? Questions like this will help to determine how often you post content and what you talk about.

4) Work on your design

All our hosting packages come with free design software that will help you get started on designing your site. From adding, removing and rearranging pages to tailoring the look and feel of the pages themselves, it’s a great tool for simple web designs.

If you’re looking for something a little more premium, there are lots of paid design tools available online too.

5) Have fun

When it comes to your own website, you’re in charge. Whatever you want to say, however you want to say it, it’s up to you. So remember to have fun when you’re building and designing your website and filling it with content.