So, you’ve been asked to make a website, and you say

Sure! I’ll do that, no problem, I got your back

Great, now you have to make this damn website, and what’s more you have to do it as quickly as possible because they got this thing going on and this place they gotta be, So here’s some info, to make sure that you don’t fall into the same problems I did.

• Make sure you actually can make a website for them, know how our going to do it from the start, if you don’t, make a test website or something, know how wordpress works and make it your own
• Make sure they understand that once they have picked a domain name, it can take a couple hours for the website to ‘go live’ and just because you have a website, does not mean your on the front page of Google outright , you’ve got to earn it.
• Pick a monthly budget, the minimum amount I have found you can run a website on is the $5 tier on DigitalOcean, and that, albeit cheap, was a really good starting point and really gave me a good understanding of how websites work and how easy it is to do with some know how.
• Just because WordPress is Free, does not mean the themes aren’t. I got into some real issues trying to get themes on a website to work because the theme provider had given me some odd importer that meant most of the posts were not editable using their own editor and I had to fork out another $29 to use their ‘upgraded editor’.
• Robots are everywhere, protect yourself. Be familiar with attackers and setup Fail2Ban, Askimet and Google analytics filters, Its worth it. False referrals are really annoying and decrease the validity of your site in search results.
• HTTPS/HTTP, is the site your making secure? Don’t set-up a website shop without securing the pages, you don’t want any bad press because some people were ripped off by an attacker.
• Check your site often.

 

Websites are great, there’s a lot of entitlement that comes from owning one, but make use of the tools out there to keep the validity and security of your site a top priority.