There are a number of steps you need to go through in order to launch your website, including building your website, uploading it to a server and ensuring that it can be “indexed” (found) by the search engines.
You can approach launching your website on a spectrum from a bare-bones approach to the most thorough approach. Let’s see how those approaches compare:
| Bare-Bones | Thorough | |
|---|---|---|
| Site Builder | Out of the Box | CMS or Custom Site |
| Design | Template | Custom Design |
| Coding | No Custom | Some Custom to Lots of Custom |
| Domain Purchase | No Difference | No Difference |
| Hosting | Out of the Box Site Builder hosts site | Purchase hosting |
| Installing site | Out of Box doesn't require it | Upload to server |
| Site Map | Auto-generated | Custom |
| Indexing | Bare minimum effort | Actively submit to search engines |
| Traffic | Wait and see | Aggressively drive traffic |
The short version is that you can pay a small fee to an out-of-the-box site creator to have a webpage online, where you essentially do everything yourself, you can get a blog and a small store, or you can have a large website with a store and lots of other features. Where you fall on this spectrum depends upon the needs of your business and the competition in your industry. My hope is that by reading this guide, you can figure out where you sit in the spectrum.