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In order to help you build your own website, we provide you this beginner's guide.

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This guide summarizes the essential steps in the realization of your website, from the thinking process to publication to make it visible to internet users!

Your website represents your business on the internet. It allows you to inform your visitors, prospects, clients, and partners about who you are, and what services and products you offer. Having a well-structured, content-rich website, with professional design and features allows more than solely to provide information on your company. It also enables you to impose yourself on the internet to conquer new prospects and secure the loyalty of your visitors.

To create a website with iPaoo, you don’t need to have any particular coding skills. You have here all the necessary tools to easily create, manage and maintain a professional website. You only need to provide some quality content and structure it according to your goals.

It is indeed pretty hard to start creating a website without having taken the time to think about it before. The first step is to analyze your needs to establish a basic statement of work. 
What are you going to present on your website? What type of information and how to organize it?

Select and customise a theme

The appearance and the content of your website are the most important components of your image on the web. During the creation of your website, you will choose a theme. This theme will be your working basis and you will customize it with your colors, your logo, your images, and your content. The design and the content you will add are the first things that the visitors will see. You will not get a second chance to seduce them, captivate their interests to offer them your services and products. The professional and customizable themes that we offer will help you to create easily a website with a minimum of effort and no coding skills. You can change the size, the type, and the font colors of all the components (texts, links, buttons, titles…). You have total control of the styles of all the components on your website. Different types of browsing are available. You can even customize the appearance of the blog pages, the private connexion page, or the error 404 page.

Website title

It is very important to give a title to your website. This name will appear in the browser window but also at the top of all your pages if you don’t have a logo. The title of the website is the title that you chose during its creation. It is very easy to change it. Go to the website’s settings and fill up the Website title box. This has a major influence on your website’s referencing. Finally, you should note that if you download your logo from Design > Logo, it will replace the title of your website on the top of all the pages. The website title will remain in the browser window and the search engine results, right before the page title.

What constitutes a website?

A website consists of several pages. The first page that a visitor sees is the home page of your site. Every page must contain different content but still share some components: the top of the page, the main browsing menu that consists of links allowing users to change pages, and the footer. The top and the bottom of the page are the same zones for all the pages of your website, which means that the content you will add to these areas will be the same for all pages of your website. You can add your copyright in the footer for example, which allows you to promote your company, or the associated brands link to legal notices, privacy policy, your information, etc. The area located between the top and the bottom of the page is the content area that is unique to each page. We should find the page title that summarizes the general idea of the page. It plays an essential role in the referencing of your site and must contain the main keyword of your page. You can add any type of content that you can structure into sections (rows) composed of grids (columns).

Content

You have decided to create your website! But who is it aimed at? This is the most important question to define the structure of your site and its content. Your website SEO begins with the quality and relevance of its content for Internet users. Analyzing your competitors’ sites is a great way to form an opinion on what to do or not to do! Note strengths and weaknesses. Observe the design, the ergonomics, the heading, the speech… Then create the tree structure of your site with SEO in mind. Note the keywords referring to your activity. Imagine what type of search a potential customer could do in a search engine to find you. Make these keywords stand out in page titles, URLs, content, and the meta description tag. It is this work that should allow you to organize the sections of your site. Search engines are intelligent. They know how to read, understand and compare your texts, appreciate their content, analyze your links... Make sure the home page provides an instant understanding of what your site is about and invites users to explore the rest of the site. If you offer several services or products, create a page for each of them. Your content should be unique, simple, and easy to understand.

Page layout

Once you have determined your target, defined your topics, prepared and optimized your texts for SEO, it is time to add it to your site and structure it to make your pages attractive and dynamic. The iPaoo editor allows you to create any type of layout. A layout is composed of 2 types of structuring elements (Sections and Grids) and Components (Text, Title, Buttons, Images, Slideshow...). Sections, Grids, and Components can be organized by Drag & Drop within the layout. Sections are the first level of the layout. They are used to separate the contents of a page into blocks of different styles and can accommodate one or more grids. The grids allow you to organize the content in one or more responsive columns that automatically adapt to the size of the visitor's screen. iPaoo provides you with several ready-to-use elements to display content in the grids that structure the pages of your site: title, text, table, image, button, icon, divider, gallery, slideshow, accordion, list... Each component offers customization options that allow total control over the appearance of your site.

Register a domain name

The domain name is the internet address or URL of your website. Choose a domain name with particular care because it will represent you on the Internet during the whole life of your company! Publishing your site under your domain name makes your site easily identifiable by search engines and easily remembered by your customers and prospects. The choice of your domain name is therefore crucial. Choose a short domain name that is easy to spell and remember. Avoid dots and dashes, they will annoy you more than anything else when you have to communicate your URL by phone for example. Make a list of 2 or 3 names and check their availability. Test your "short list" with your friends and family and then register the lucky winner with any registrar such as Gandi. Once you have created your website with iPaoo, it can be configured to be visible on your domain name from the website settings. In addition, you get a free SSL certificate for a secure user experience in https.

Promote your website

You have finalized your website? Now you have to make it known! It's a bit like opening a store. You need to send out invitations, plant directional signs to direct users to the front door... your homepage! After finalizing and publishing your website, you can submit its URL to free press release sites, professional directories… Ask your partners to put a link to your site's URL on their own website and do link exchanges with sites in the same field of activity as yours. Once your site is indexed by search engines, Internet users will be able to find you on searches for keywords related to your business provided that these keywords are present in the URL, the title of your page, and its content. You understand, after having created your site, to be visible and well positioned in search engines, requires some additional actions.

Generating traffic

To increase traffic to your site, you need to increase its page rank. Creating a website with good content, rich in keywords and good backlinks will help increase the popularity of your site and thus it's ranking in search engines. Very often, getting good results requires restructuring the content of your site. Use a statistics program like Google Analytics to analyze your site's traffic, the most viewed pages, how long visitors stay, and which keywords bring them to your site. Use this information to improve the pages where your visitors stay the least, drive traffic to the least visited pages, consider Google Adwords campaigns, etc. Participate in forums and comment on topics related to your business on blogs. Build your social network by starting a Facebook page. Develop an editorial calendar by adding at least one news item per month to your website.

Build visitor loyalty

Creating a website and generating traffic is just the beginning. Your visitors will only come back to your website if they find interesting content, recent news about your services and products, events, or promotional offers. Use the Form or Code component to allow them to subscribe to a mailing list and send them this news with a newsletter. You can also create a Blog and post important announcements there that you will relay to your Facebook account. Keeping visitors on your site is a much more complex job than getting them there for the first time. However, your most loyal visitors will mention you on their own blogs, social networks and will also bring qualified traffic to your site.