Bootstrapping a Website

Your website is the face of your company. It is the most effective means of sharing information about your business. A website is also important aggregator of customer information.

Before you would need a developer to build and launch a website. Most business do not have developers on staff full time. And, if your company does have a development team, you don’t want to take resources away from main projects.

This results in companies relying on freelancers and agencies for website development. Like hiring a mechanic, lack of knowledge about the work required lead to high prices. Unlike hiring a mechanic, realizing your vision for a website requires frequent collaboration. Often poor communication would lead to unsatisfactory results.

Adding insult to injury, to make updates to the website you would need to bring the developers back. Even little things like content changes would outside hiring help. This would continue to add cost to your website.

Even after the wide adoption of WordPress, things did not change much. You might purchase a theme for your website. But still to customize you are relying on outside developers to make changes.

Too bootstrap your business and get to marketing fast, you need a website this is easy to update and change. Now there are cost effective tools allows exactly that. The tools I recommend allow you, a content writer, or a designer to make a great looking websites.

Using the platform and theme I recommend will remove your reliance on developers. You will reduce costs and be able to optimize your website fast.

NOTE : Most websites can be transferred to the recommend platform less than a week.

You may have heard or seen advertisements for WIX or Squarespace. These are web services ( also known as gui website builders) where you can build a good looking website with just a few clicks. Users select a premade theme then add text and customizations, no code necessary.

These are great services that let you build a website with almost zero knowledge of HTML or anything else. However, they have some serious downsides.

First of all you either pay a monthly or annual charge to use them. How customized you can make your website is often limited to pre provided templates. As well, even though these services make web design easier, they can still be very difficult to use.

Wordpress is a website hosting service that is free and widely used. WordPress is works like the previous services. Using WordPress lets webmasters apply independently designed themes to a website. These themes affect how a website looks. Themes are free of charge or a premium license. Some themes like the one I recommend even include gui interfaces like SquareSpace.

What makes WordPress such a great tool is that in addition to themes, WordPress has an extensive library of free plugins. Like themes, plugins are free or premium and are easy to apply to a website. What a plugin does though can be almost anything. It can be a way to link services to your website or provide a widget.

There are hundreds of thousands of themes and plugins available through wordpress. Most of which are 100% customizable.

As mentioned before customizing a themes or plugins may still freelancers. But by using the recommended theme and plugins you may only need to hire them once or never. This is what makes WordPress much better than other services.

Once you start using X Theme you may start to recognize some of the elements on websites. That is because X Theme used for tons of websites. You are provided several templates to build a website lettings some site looks similar, but the templates can be customize to look like anything you would like.

A huge plus is everything is mobile optimized. This helps your SEO and conversion rates!

X Theme a theme for WordPress that gives it the GUI functionality as Wix or Squarespace. This is a theme that lets you drag and drop content to build your website.

I could go on forever about the features and element provide by X Theme to make your website, but suffice to say that all of it looks great (one click parallax scrolling is a definite standout).

If you are looking to transfer your website to X Theme and are not familiar with HTML or CSS at all I would recommend hiring someone for the task. It should be a relatively small job and accomplished with in a week or two (depending on the size of your website). After the initial website transfer you will be able to make new website pages and content with just a few click and will not need the developers help.

This is where some basic HTML and CSS knowledge is helpful. If there is something you can not do yourself try doing a Google search first. Most things you want to accomplish will be easier than you think.

For more complicated changes, X Theme comes with some of the best customer support I have ever experienced. Just enter your question in the forum and within a few hour you will usually have someone provide you the exact answer you need and way to copy and paste the code you need to enter.

The best part is X Theme cost a one time amount of $50. No annual fees or licensing (however, more than a year of customer support costs more). No other service come close to competing in price and when you take into account the time and money you save developing a website picking X Theme is a no brainer.

Plugins are vital to optimizing your website efficiently. Most plugins you need are free but there are lots of premium ones that are worthwhile. What make X Theme such a great value is the premium plugs its comes with. Other plugin may offer premium features but you will only need to basic version.

There are over 20 plugins included with X Theme and most of them are excellent. I will not go into detail about all over them. Below is a review of the most valuable ones.

There is an endless library of plugins out there that can be used to optimized your website. Many of them do similar things as one another. This often makes picking a plugin a matter of preference. There are a few other plugins I recommend.

Regardless if you want to modify your website or accomplish some task there likely plugin for that task. All you need do is search for it on Google.

There are two more plugins I recommend that you use on your website.

The next steps in bootstrapping a website is creating the content. To write effective content you will need to do some research. Lucky for you, this was creating buyer personas and planning the buyer’s journey.

Now you need to only structure the content on the page to match the research you did.