What Does It Take To Make a Successful Website?

Introduction

I chose this topic since I have a true passion for computer science and software engineering. I find computers and coding fascinating and I am currently learning three different coding languages: Python, HTML, and CSS (Python outside of school, and self-teaching myself the other two). I wanted to learn about how to make a website and how to make it successful. Technology and websites are the future of brand identity, advertising and communication, and many people regard it as a business’ best asset. For any business, they need to have a good website to attract potential customers; there are many factors and choices when a website is involved and that is what I will be delving into.

The process of making a website is one of the most important things a software developer can learn. Websites represent a brand identity, be it a business or an individual, and the primary way people can access your content through the internet. My research touches on many different questions and will show numerous unique factors that you need to consider when making a website. No matter the use and magnitude of the website, a personal portfolio, a blog for a small group of people, or a website for your business, you need to factor all of these in to make sure you are making the right choices in order for your website to be the most successful that it can be in your chosen field. I will be exploring topics like what steps you need to take to build a website, how long a website lasts before it becomes abandoned, and whether you should use a website builder or code it yourself.

What Are The Steps To Building a Website?

(Note: Any statistics will be for a complex website, with multiple pages, features, and programming languages.)

Planning Phase

Planning the layout of your website could be the most important step since it is the base of everything you will be doing later. This usually takes 2-3 weeks (Matthews-El, T. and Bottorff, C., 2023) to think about what you will code since you have to think about literally everything that would affect the successfulness of your website and the quality of it. Some factors you need to consider are the demographic (use different designs based on your target audience), the colour scheme and design, and features, for example forms, where your audience can interact with your website. There are however, three main things that you need to focus on when planning:

1. How complex will your website be?
2. How will your website be created (just you, by a team of developers, or using a website builder)?
3. What is the purpose of the website?

As part of your planning, you must ensure you have a solid vision and framework so when you get into the flow of coding, there would not be additional issues that would take more time to be addressed. You also need to remember that websites need to be maintained. There should be regular updating of your website and adding new content, fixing any bugs, improving poor user experience, striving to reach the target audience, and managing your SEO protocol (Novak, J. and Smith, A., 2024). SEO is Search Engine Optimization, which is a process of ensuring your website ranks high on search engines.

Using planning tools such as flowcharts can be very useful to visualize your plan and layout before you start creating the content that will go on to the actual website. Tools to help could be the use of a whiteboard or LucidChart platform, so you can easily adapt your plan at any time. Another useful tool is a timetable or a calendar so you can know when you should meet certain deadlines for the different steps. Lastly, you can use project management platforms which are especially helpful if you are working within a large group, and you need to constantly be able to share content and update each other.

Content Creation

Content creating is the longest step and it usually takes about 4-6 weeks (Matthews-El, T. and Bottorff, C., 2023). For a website to even be functional you need content on your website, and this comes in many different forms. You can go beyond just simple blogs and articles and add audio or video which are proven to increase visitor retention by up to 57% (An, M., 2017) and this would help out with many different elements, for example in an e-commerce website the user would stay for longer which would most likely lead in to them buying more things. Content creation is not just about making sure your website is ready for launch, it is the ability to keep on updating and improving your website with new content.

There are many different tools that can make the process of content creation faster and improved, such as Canva, which is used for custom designs, usually text and images, but can also create videos and audios as well. Grammarly, can help you avoid typos which makes the website seem more professional and it helps with better first impressions. These additional aspects will make the content creation period take longer, but the effect that it has on the successfulness of your website is definitely worth the time spent on it. The main coding language used in this step is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which gives you the content, but it does not control the design aspect which is controlled in the next step. It takes care of all the structure and main content of the website which you can alter later on.

Website Design

Designing your website takes around two to three weeks (Matthews-El, T. and Bottorff, C., 2023) since you already have all of the content, you are just focusing on the aesthetics. Unlike content creation, this step uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to alter the style of the HTML elements. It consists of many different aspects that you have to learn even if you are only working on a single page.

There are a few steps you have to take. First you should make a mock-up for the website that shows what the final form would be like without it being completed or functional. After that, you should think about whether the idea is realistic before you commit time and money into it, finding the best styles and colour themes, and how the website will look on different devices. Once you decide these, you need to choose how you will achieve this. You can either code the whole thing yourself if you have the skill, or you can use various tools or templates to help you visualise what you want to do and then copy and paste the code for it. I prefer coding it myself as you have more freedom, and you can test it for yourself.

After this, your website should be done, but you cannot launch it just yet since you need to test it all out in case there are any bugs which would lead to a poor user experience.

Testing and Review

This process takes between one and two weeks (Matthews-El, T. and Bottorff, C., 2023), but it is crucial if you want to have an effective website. It is a period of time between completion and launch where you can review your website and test different things.

Some of the things you need to factor in is the site speed which a study found that if it took four seconds or less to load (Wiegand, M., 2022), it was ideal for e-commerce but it might be different for specific purposes; Google itself found that bounce rates increased when it took more than three seconds to load. The most important thing is the user experience which can be improved by little features such as a ‘return to top’ button, correct font colour and optimal font size, language settings, chatbots available for customer service when it’s out of business hours, and the user experience in general. Content quality is critical too, as a study found that typos, grammar mistakes, and writing errors makes you lose out on twice as many customers (Carufel, R., 2019), if not fixed. You should also check for plugins which might not be compatible for everyone.

What Next?

After you finish these steps, you should be finished and ready for launch, but you need to be prepared to spend a lot of time since in total it takes around 10-14 weeks (Matthews-El, T. and Bottorff, C., 2023) to take a little idea and turn it in to a fully completed website. This could take longer or shorter depending on the complexity, the tools you use, and the number / skill of the people who are working on completing the website.

How Long Does a Website Last Until It Is Abandoned

When you make a website that you spent a lot of time on, you expect it to be used for a while or to never be abandoned at all, but usually, a website only lasts for around two years and seven months (Crestodina, A., Unknown) before it is no longer used. This data was taken from medium to large business, so we are not talking about a little blog, we are talking about established businesses (Crestodina, A., Unknown) . There are a few factors that you have to consider to make it last longer.

You should always be adding new content to make users have that brand new feeling every time. You can remove links or pages that people click on the least to declutter your menus and make navigating easier. You can change design elements like colour pallets and font types to give it a change which can be the base for a rebranding (Crestodina, A., Unknown) . You can improve the homepage to make users want to stay more but be careful since if you improve it too much there would be a quality difference between it and the rest of the website (Crestodina, A., Unknown) . As well as this you could add improvements to most popular pages or the places where people leave the most.

The main clue to redesign your page is when someone asks for your website and you say, “I have a website, but please don’t look at it”. This is rock-bottom. A website is the most powerful marketing tool that a business can have since literally anyone around the globe can access to it.

Should You Use a Website Builder or Code It Yourself?

Both of these methods of making a website work really well, but they suit different people and different cases to be used in. A website builder is faster, requires less effort, and you do not need to know anything about coding at all, but coding the website yourself gives so much more freedom in the design which is why most developers choose this option.

What's The Difference

There are many differences between the two options, and they have their own merits. The biggest difference is how you make the content. For a website builder, you can “drag and drop” the content into templates and use a visual editor to make it interactive without writing a single line of code. Building a website from scratch is much more flexible but very time consuming as just for a single web page, it could take thousands of lines and a few hours. You need to learn HTML and CSS for a standard web page, but for it to be interactive, you need to learn JavaScript and a server-side language as well such as Python or PHP (Aris, S., 2024).

The general differences are the knowledge required, how easy it is to learn and use, the time it takes to create it, the cost, and the customisability. A website builder wins on the first three, but manually coding wins on the last two which is why it is such a hard decision to actually make.

Pros and Cons of a Website Builder

Some of the pros include the ability to save a lot of your time, the ability to easily use it, the fact that it can be cost effective for a small website (since it can include marketing, security, and SEO tools. Note that this is only for small websites as larger ones will rapidly ramp up the cost (Aris, S., 2024)). It is easy to update / maintain as well, since you can use the drag and drop feature to change things very quickly.

There are quite a few cons as well, such as the design limitations, the performance (they take a long time to load because of the large back-end processes to deal with), the flexibility (you can only use basic functionalities and tools), the website migration (if you want to change host, then you can’t save your website), and of course the security since they are all built with the same code (Aris, S., 2024).

The best reason or case to use a website builder is if it is your first website and have no knowledge of coding whatsoever, as it is an easy way to get started and make simple websites like a portfolio, a blog, or a small online store. It also includes SEO and marketing which can be particularly useful if you want a lot of visitors.

Pros and Cons of Coding It Yourself

Some of the pros include the performance (since you can optimize the back-end yourself), the customization (you can change literally anything), the integrations with any tools or API (Application Programming Interface), the migration to a different host, the security since your code is unique (this is the case unless the website isn’t checked properly and in that case it is more prone to being hacked) (Aris, S., 2024).

There are a few cons as well such as the time it takes to make the website, the cost in some cases where you might have to buy the services from a developer to help you, the difficulty since you need to know various coding languages, and the maintenance since you have to write all of the code for bugs and updates.

I think that the best reason to code it yourself is if you already have the knowledge of the coding languages and if you prefer performance and flexibility over simplicity.

To Sum Up The Decision

There are five key elements that you need to take into consideration when making this huge decision. These questions encompass the five key points, your coding ability, your goals for the website, the time frame that you have for it, your budget, and the updates and maintenance.

• Do you already know any coding languages or have any technical skills?
• Do you want a complex website that stands out or are you happy with a generic one?
• Do you have a long-time frame (6 weeks or more) to code the website?
• Are you willing to pay a bit more for hosting and domain services for quality?
• Can you manage to update and add new content by yourself every so often?

If you answered yes to most of these (especially the first and third one), I recommend coding the website yourself for a better result, if not, then you should use a website builder. Either way you should definitely have a website for any business that you run or for an online portfolio. A website is your Brand Identity after all.

Conclusion

In summary, we have looked into the key components of how to build a successful website by exploring different topics such as the steps to make a website and the time it takes to build one, how to improve the longevity of your web page, and also whether you should code it from scratch, or use an online builder. We found out that there are many different steps and elements you need to think about when building the website to make the user have the best experience they can. As well as this, we looked into how you can increase the lifetime of your website through different factors and methods. Lastly, we discovered whether or not a website builder or coding it yourself is more suitable for you. Overall, the process of making a successful website is a very complex process, and through building this whole website from a blank slate, I can appreciate the amount of time and effort it takes to just build a simple one, let alone a world-wide successful website.

(Note to Assessor: Please note I am aware I have gone over the word count, however due to the complexity of the steps, I wanted to cover as much as possible)

Bibliography

Aris, S. (2024) Website Builder vs Coding: Which Method Suits You Best. Available at: Website Builder vs Coding: Understanding the Pros and Cons (hostinger.com) (Accessed: 04/01/24)

Matthews-El, T. and Bottorff, C. (2023) How Long Does It Take To Build A Website? Available at: How Long Does It Take To Build A Website? – Forbes Advisor (Accessed: 04/01/24)

Crestodina, A. (Unknown) What is the average website lifespan? 10 Factors In Website Life Expectancy. Available at: What is the average website lifespan? 10 Factors In Website Life Expectancy | Orbit Media Studios (Accessed: 04/01/24)

An, M. (2017) Content Trends: Preferences Emerge Along Generational Fault Lines. Available at: Content Trends: Preferences Emerge Along Generational Fault Lines (hubspot.com) (Accessed: 04/01/24)

Wiegand, M. (2022) Site Speed is (Still) Impacting Your Conversion Rate. Available at: Site Speed is (Still) Impacting Your Conversion Rate - Portent (Accessed: 04/01/24)

Carufel, R. (2019) Website spelling and grammar error are costlier than you may think. Available at: Website spelling and grammar errors are costlier than you may think - Agility PR Solutions (Accessed: 04/01/24)

Novak, J. and Smith, A. (2024) Best SEO Tools & Software (March 2024). Available at: Best SEO Tools For Small Business – Forbes Advisor (Accessed: 05/03/24)