If you’re thinking about creating your own website, there are a few things you should consider before you can start thinking about fun stuff like colors and fonts. And of course, the list that I’m going to give you is not final, but these are things that you usually just don’t consider before you start.

Who is Your Target Audience?

Before you start your website, think about who your audience truly is. And I know this might seem trivial at first, but it is very, very important as knowing your audience. This might seem trivial in the beginning, but knowing who your audience is and who you cater to will make the decision making process later so much easier.

Let’s say you want to sell meditation candles. Imagine how different a website would look like if your audience were, let’s say 60 plus year old women who like to meditate, or 20 year old men that just, want to have the “yoga lifestyle”. Just imagine how different the website would look like. Naturally, you would already know that, but writing it down and making it as specific as possible will help you decide on things like design, colors, even tone of voice, how you want to address people in your emails or just in your copy of the website.

Now, I’m not going to explain to you how to research your target audience, but I’m going to give you a few pointers:

• Start by thinking about your ideal client. Who is this person? Does this person like to, do certain things? Is it a man? Is it a woman? Do they live in the countryside or in the city? Think about all of these things and make it as specific as possible.
• It also helps thinking about possible objections your target person might have. This way you can structure your website copy much better.
• And last but not least, think about how you want to address them and how you want to talk to them. Do you want to call them by their first name or do you want to use specific words when you communicate with them?

Remember, these are just a few pointers, but you also don’t have to make a huge deal out of it. Just make sure you know who you cater to so you can make better decisions down the line.

Domain Name

The second thing you should consider is your domain name. And just in case you don’t know what a domain is:

The a domain is the address that redirects you to a specific website. For example, youtube.com, google.com, instagram.com. All of these addresses you enter into your browser and they will redirect you to the website that you want to see.

Now, many people try to choose a domain that contains their brand name, which of course makes a lot of sense, right? You just need to be aware that creating a brand is a very long and hard process. To get people to know you by your brand name is of course the goal, but you might not have enough time to do that. You might run out of time before people actually know your brand. That is why I suggest you choose a domain name that contains the main keyword that you want to rank for in the search engines.

Let’s say you’re a copywriter and your name is Hermione Granger. So you might want to have your name as your domain name, but I would suggest to do something like, “Granger Copywriting” or “Copywriting Hermione” or something like that because this will not only contain your brand name or in this case your name, it will also contain the main keyword that you want to rank for namely copywriting.

In my personal opinion and also in my experience from working with different companies, this is a better option. Not only will people recognize instantly what you do when they see your domain name, but also search engines will know exactly what you offer because you have the main keyword inside of your domain name.

If you want know what your main keyword is, just try looking at your competitors. What keywords do they use? What is the one keyword that keeps up back all the time? And if you want to go pro, why don’t you try using a keyword research tool? You could do something like Ubersuggest. Uber suggests is a tool from THE SEO guru, Neil Patel.

Hosting Provider

Before you can start with your website, you need to decide on a hosting provider. And just in case some of you might not know what hosting is, let me give you a very quick and hopefully easy explanation:

So if you create a PowerPoint presentation you have a PowerPoint file, and the file contains the slides of your presentation. When you create it, you save this file onto your computer, usually into a folder, or you can even add it to the cloud (Google Drive). And the same is true for your website. Your website consists of many files and these files need to be stored somewhere, and that’s where the hosting company comes in. They will save your website on a server and will make it available to users worldwide.

Finding a good hosting provider can be a little bit overwhelming, especially if you don’t know what is important when choosing hosting. In general, I would suggest to go with a well known provider, instead of let’s say a small agency hosting. And not because the hosting might not be as good, it often is, but with an established provider, you make sure that you have the customer service that you need.With established providers, usually you can do a lot of settings yourself and if you need help, they’re very, very quick to answer.

To get a little bit more techy, make sure that the provider that you choose offers free SSL certificates. An SSL certificate is something that will make your website more secure. You can recognize it by going on any website and looking at the url. If it says https, it it secured. And having a secure website is also a ranking factor for Google. So it is very, very important. Some hosting providers, choose to not offer free SSL certificates even though there are companies like, let’s encrypt that actually offer this. And usually with your hosting you can implement let’s encrypt SSL certificates, but some of them – I don’t know why – want to charge you a lot of money for it. So please make sure that you choose a hosting provider that has free SSL.

And lastly, one thing that a lot of people don’t think about in the beginning: Make sure you know your email needs. Do you only need one email address? Do you need multiple? Then make sure that when choosing a hosting provider you know exactly what they offer. Sometimes the email is included. Sometimes it’s just one email that is included and sometimes email is not even included and you will have to pay extra. So just make sure you know what you get yourself into and you know your personal needs so you can make the right decision.

Of course, there is so much more to hosting and this is just a brief introduction, but these are things that I think any newbie should think about when choosing a hosting provider.

Let me give you two examples of very good hosting providers for WordPress websites that I can recommend:

• SiteGround is a great alternative for people who are on a very strict budget and who just want to start out and still have very good quality hosting.
• If you want to go full pro, you can check out WPEngine. You can even set up a staging website with them. And even though they are more expensive, I can tell you their customer service is amazing. They answer super fast and any questions you might have, they will be able to help you out.