Simple Steps to Build a Successful Website

In the following paragraphs, I will present a summary that explains the experience of establishing this website, starting from the first idea I worked on in 2004 until 2020. In this article, I will mention the information I have collected previously, and this information can be a clear and short path for anyone who wants to create a website on the Internet.

The First Website

My website design story began with Microsoft FrontPage in 2004 when I designed my first website to publish it on the Internet. At the time, the website included several sections, including a section dedicated to topics related to aviation🛩, and another section that included dozens of flashes that I designed using Macromedia Flash5. These flashes included some primitive games and many different presentations. After I finished designing the website (its size was 150 MB), I moved to the stage of publishing it on the Internet. Here, I faced several difficulties related to hosting the website in terms of hosting size, cost, and payment methods, in addition to the problem of slow internet speed👇.

In addition to that, there was no help or support as I was working entirely on my own, so I postponed publishing the site until the right opportunity came, and when it came, my site had been deleted (a virus entered the device👾) after formatting the computer. Several years later, I reconsidered creating a website specializing in military topics, but I also did not have the opportunity due to the circumstances and conditions we went through.

I was in a state of depression 😟 at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 (problems related to housing, university, etc.), the important thing is that I thought of doing anything to get out of this situation, especially since I had recently finished writing the draft of my first book (learn about the experience of publishing my first book here) and started looking for publishing houses to adopt this book, and here an idea came to me: Why don’t I create my own blog and display my book on it? Thus, I revive an old idea that I have always sought to achieve, after that I wrote some ideas about the initial vision of the blog and its content, and it was decided that the blog would be of a scientific nature, which is the field closest to me at this time, after that I re-searched for the most important topics related to website design, which I will mention briefly in the following lines.

Blogging Platforms

At first, I started working with two blogs at the same time, the first on the Blogger platform from Google, and the second on the WordPress platform from Automattic. After that, I decided to stop using the Blogger platform and continue with the WordPress blog for many reasons that I will not go into explaining here. Of course, we must not forget that Blogger blogs are hosted on Google servers and therefore are highly reliable, but the ease of dealing with and managing the WordPress platform was the first motivation to continue with it. The WordPress platform is known as an open source content management system that can be used to create a beautiful website, blog or application, as hundreds of thousands of developers, content creators and website owners constantly collaborate to improve the WordPress platform experience through monthly meetings in more than 817 cities around the world. More than 60 million people around the world have chosen WordPress to run the place they call “home”. The latest statistics indicate that 39% of websites use the WordPress platform, which includes beautiful designs and powerful features with more than (55) thousand add-ons to enhance and expand the capabilities of the website (quoted from the WordPress website).

Domain and Hosting

In order to have a website (blog or other), you need two things: a custom domain and hosting for the website. The domain is the website address (in our case: Farhan2030.com) that contains the domain name (Farhan2030) and the extension (com.). The domain can be free or paid. The free domain on the WordPress platform has the extension (wordpress.) added to it, meaning the domain is in this form (Farhan2030.wordpress.com). If the domain is purchased, (wordpress.) is removed to become a paid domain in this form (Farhan2030.com). This domain is renewed annually for a sum of money. There are many extensions such as (com.) and (org.) and many others. The choice of the extension depends on the nature of the site that we will work on as well as the capabilities of the site owner, as domain prices vary according to the extension that we will choose.

As for hosting, as we know, any website is a collection of texts (texts, codes, etc.) and multimedia (images, videos, music) and other elements, files, pages, and articles that the website needs to work and that need dedicated places to store them called servers. These servers are generally either self-servers, meaning that the website owner (whether a person or a company) builds the server and hosts his website himself, or they are servers affiliated with companies that provide hosting services to the public.

Hosting can be either directly through dedicated hosting via the WordPress platform owned by Automattic or through hosting such as Bluehost and Hostinger which can later be linked to the WordPress platform. The hosting benefits that the customer will get depend on the type of hosting plan he will choose, as hosting ranges from limited hosting in terms of storage space, support, templates, etc. to powerful hosting in terms of storage space, speed, support, security, and professional templates.

Themes

As we mentioned earlier, the blog consists of content (texts, multimedia, attachments, etc.), pages, and articles. It can be said that the theme is the form in which this content appears and the way it interacts with each other. The templates can be:
-Free or paid.
-Simple, premium or professional.
-Ready or designed and installed.
-Varied according to the blog’s field: photo gallery, online store, author, education, news site…etc.

Farhan’s blog was initially run using the (Dara) template, then I used and tried many templates such as: (Rebalance), (Independent publisher 2), (Libretto), (Nucleare) and others. Here, you can choose the template using the filter feature to show the templates that suit the nature of the website (free or paid templates, templates according to the site’s field, templates according to the number of columns, templates according to the order of elements, etc.). After choosing the appropriate template, the template elements are customized (header, footer, main area, side boxes, pop-up windows, etc.).

Website name and logo

After choosing the appropriate template, the blog name is added (if we have not previously specified it) and the tagline (Slogan). In our case, the blog name (Farhan’s Blog) and the tagline (Knowledge for All) are combined with the blog logo, which represents the next step. Any website owner who seeks the success of his website must choose an original and unique logo for the blog. Certain websites that provide logo design services can be used either for free or for a fee. The website owner can also design the logo himself, as in our case, where the logo (Farhan’s Blog) represents a chestnut-sided warbler.

Pages and Posts

After completing the previous steps, you must start writing some basic pages for the website, such as the (Privacy Policy) page. This page is necessary to evaluate the quality of the blog, as it includes topics related to privacy protection, property rights, and other matters that the blog owner must clarify to blog visitors. After that, the (About the Blog) page is created, which provides the visitor with a brief definition of the blog and its goals. Then, the (Contact) page is created, which explains how to communicate with the blog administrators. After writing the previous basic pages, one of the pages must be selected as the blog’s home page (it is initially selected by default), which has the main address (in our case Farhan2030.com). You can also write any pages you want to put, noting that pages are often fixed over time and are only modified at spaced intervals, which distinguishes them from articles.

After finishing writing the pages, you can start writing blog posts (whether articles, photo displays, lessons, etc.) according to the field of the blog that we work in. Posts are often updated continuously, and they are often collected and arranged according to categories and are supported by tags. Through categories, posts can be collected within one field with each other (for example: scholarships), noting that it is possible to place one post within more than one category and thus it will appear within the categories specified for it. As for tags, they help facilitate the search for posts and facilitate and improve their appearance in search results, whether inside the blog or outside it in various search engines. In our case (Farhan’s blog), we notice the presence of several main pages (Scientific Publications, Contact Us) in the header main menu at the top of the blog and a main page (Privacy Policy) in the footer at the bottom of the blog in addition to some secondary pages that can be accessed while browsing the blog. We also notice the presence of several main categories in the main menu of the blog (Balance Theory, Workplace Organization 5s, Farhan’s Experiences, Scholarships, Scientific Topics, Continuous Improvement, Organizational Learning), and in turn, each category contains many posts that belong to this category.

Finally, it is worth noting that there are some important topics related to blogging, such as (SEO: search engine optimization) and other matters that would take a long time to explain here, so I will devote special articles to them later.

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This article by Farhan Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International