Creation of a website in the year 2025
The end of the year is fast approaching and many small businesses, freelancers and start-ups are thinking about setting up a website by 2025. This goal is a good start to making your services or products accessible to a global audience. And it can take your business to new heights. In this blog post, we'll take a look at the tools and steps you can use to easily create the website yourself with a little homework.
Several ways to create a website yourself
There are many different ways to build a website yourself, from paid website builders like SquareSpace or Wix to self-hosted options like WordPress or Joomla. The biggest difference is that with paid website builders, the website is often not entirely yours.
As long as you want to keep the website, you are often stuck with the (high) monthly costs, which as a small business, start-up or freelancer you would rather move elsewhere. With a self-hosted CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress or Joomla, the website is all yours and you can do whatever you want with your website.
You will have to maintain the website yourself, but with a little effort it is easy to manage. For most users, we recommend choosing your own content management system website for this reason, only if you are looking for a complete solution for which you need (almost) no technical knowledge yourself, then we recommend a website builder.
So be prepared for higher costs and less flexibility. It is important to mention that as a hosting partner we are not directly involved in what you ultimately choose, we only take care of the foundation of the website. In other words: the hosting package.
WordPress, the most popular option
WordPress has been the most frequently chosen option for setting up your own website for many years. It is a simple tool that allows you to design your website visually, i.e. without any programming knowledge. The biggest advantage of WordPress is that it is used by millions of users and is created and managed by thousands of developers. For any problems you have on the website, 99% of the time there is already a solution and a ready-made plug-in that will fix it for you.
Installing and customizing the theme
Another great advantage of WordPress is that you can customize the layout of the website incredibly easily by using one of the many thousands of themes that are available both for free and for free. Once you have installed a theme, you can change the layout and design of your website at the touch of a button. And within an afternoon, you'll have it completely customized to your taste.
Expanding and designing a website
To extend your website further, you can use plug-ins alongside the theme, both for Joomla and WordPress, as well as many other options. These are smaller software packages that can fulfill specific wishes to expand your website. They can be installed easily and directly via the administration environment on your website. They can be used to add a wealth of functions, allowing you to add a contact form to your website in a beautiful way, for example.
However, it is advisable to always limit the number of plug-ins to the essentials, as they all have to work together and this can lead to conflicts. Any plug-ins that you have installed in the past and no longer use should be removed completely as this will cause pollution if you don't remove them. And it's unnecessary to keep them.
Reach new customers
Once you've started building your website and achieved a satisfactory result, it's time to attract customers and visitors to your website. There are various ways to do this too, but the three main methods you should keep in mind are the following:
Advertising
Advertising, especially on search engines like Google and the Google Display Network, is one of the most reliable ways to drive targeted traffic to your website.
Logically, this is only paid advertising, and once you stop the ads, the traffic to your website will also dry up at the push of a button. For many start-ups and small businesses, a lot can be achieved with Google ads, even on a small budget. This is because you can use them cost-effectively with only relevant search terms. However, if your search term is popular with large companies, you can quickly have to pay several euros per click. It is therefore often necessary to find out what is possible within your budget and to pay close attention to this, especially in the first few months, in order to make the most of it.
Content marketing
Content marketing means using text, videos and other content on your website to attract an audience. This can be done in many different ways, but one of the most reliable methods is running a blog. There you share relevant information for your target audience in the form of news, tips or articles. And then share this information on social media to attract attention.
Marketing via social media
Social media is also a powerful marketing tool that can bring a lot of results if used correctly. Different audiences are active on different social media and it is advisable to join the most popular ones like Facebook, Instagram, X and also video like YouTube and TikTok. There you can create interesting and entertaining posts with the aim of gaining followers who will eventually come to your website. Again, this is a craft and requires almost constant attention to succeed. So share posts frequently and try to keep the quality high.
Also, pay attention to where your target audience hangs out the most and try to focus on that. In 2025, developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) will continue even further. Especially now that live search results can also be used by AI.
So it will be a year in which exciting developments will take place, and if you haven't yet created a website for your business, it's high time to get to grips with it. Are you ready to take these steps too? Take them together with your hosting partner, MijnHostingPartner.nl!