Top Preparations You Should Make Before Starting a Website or Blog

If you are planning on starting a website or a blog then it’s incredibly important to make sure that you prepare properly first and this is a factor that many people will overlook. When you start off with a website or a blog it can be a very simple matter of writing regular updates and expressing yourself, and in short it might seem somewhat straightforward and simple. As you progress though, you will find that your site will grow and that it can become more and more complex and difficult to manage. A website with lots of different pages and drop down menus and a user base of thousands of regular visitors becomes very difficult to change in any way shape or form without damaging your existing success. At this point then you may find that it becomes too late to make changes to your site and the way it operates and this can create a lot of difficulties and eventually mean the downfall of your online business.

As such then it is highly important that before your website or blog becomes big, and before you’ve even finished designing it, that you make certain that it is built with the future in mind and in such a way that it will be easy to manage in future and that it will be able to stand up to any changes made. Here are some ways you can do just that.

Content Management

Your content management system is the system you will use to keep track of all the content you are uploading, as well as to actually upload that content and to delete it and edit it as necessary. If you decide to go down the WordPress route then for instance, then this will provide your content management system – allowing you to upload new posts and attach pictures at the click of a button, and enabling you to view old posts and delete them, or quickly alter the way the site looks.

If you make your site yourself by coding it, or by using a web design company, then you need to create a similar content management system for yourself. This can be something as simple as a few lines of PHP to upload new articles and add the formatting for you, but by doing something like this you will be able to add more posts more easily which will result in more frequently updated content and fewer problems.

Design and Coding

When you design and code your site in the first place, you need to make sure that you do it in such a way that you can change it if you need to, and that keeps track of what everything does. Use annotations to track any changes you might make, and use include files and CSS scripts to make it easy for you to change your style and colour scheme without having to edit every single page individually. Again, if you use a web design company then they will take care of this for you, but make sure you let them know you want to be able to make edits yourself as necessary.

Hosting

When you choose your WordPress hosting package you need to think about this long and hard. Things like your bandwidth and storage space might not be important when you begin, but when you have thousands of hits daily it can become a serious issue. Using cloud hosting or other solutions can help to future-proof your site.

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