It’s safe to say that we spend a good chunk of our days on the internet (heck, you must be on the internet right now if you’re reading this), and thanks to that level of ubiquity we tend to take it for granted — we kind of assume that everything on the web is simply…there, and often forget how difficult it is to actually create a functioning website. Unless you’re one of the dedicated few who’ve made the painstaking effort of educating themselves in the intricacies of web development, chances are that you just pick a cool-looking WordPress theme and call it a day…but what if we told you that you don’t have to watch hundreds of YouTube tutorials to make a decent website?
Enter: GoDaddy. You might not have heard of them before, but you’ve definitely seen their “product”: with 20% of the entire internet’s domain names registered under them, there’s a good chance that some of your favourite sites are hosted by them, or maybe you’ve watched one of their infamous ads before. And as some of those ads might have mentioned, hosting websites isn’t the only thing they do — they have a pretty sweet website designer as well, and while it’s not going to turn you into a full-fledged web developer overnight, it’s certainly a good place to start.
A Foolproof Interface
Creating an entire website from scratch can be an understandably daunting task, but thankfully the website builder does a good job of easing you into the process — you simply need to select the purpose of your site (personal profile, clothing store, etc) and it does all of the heavy lifting by creating a home page that includes all the components that usually come with such a page. If you aren’t satisfied with what you see, there are a few templates that you can choose from, so right from the get go you already have a fully functioning home page.
Perhaps the biggest thing going for the website builder is just how intuitive it is — want to change the text of a header? Just click on it, type out what you want, and it’ll change without you having to see a single CSS code, and the same goes for photos as well. There’s something very Apple-esque about the simplicity of it all, and really all you have to do is fill in the blanks until it looks like what you want it to be.
If you ever feel like your home page is missing something, adding a new section to it is just as easy: choose where in the page you want it to be, lick on the green arrow on the side to pick from a pretty extensive list that includes text boxes, video players and even food menus, and it’ll seamlessly integrate itself into the page’s architecture.
Make your website uniquely yours
Of course, all the good text in the world wouldn’t mean a thing if it wasn’t paired with images, and if you don’t have some of your own just yet, GoDaddy’s got you covered on that front as well. The builder comes with a respectable collection of royalty-free photos to get you started, and we should probably mention that there are also several font themes to help make your website a little more personalised.
Once you’re satisfied with your home page, it’s all a matter of creating a new page and going through the entire customisation process again for another section of the website, and continuing that until you end up with a complete website. One cool thing that warrants a mention is that whatever you create on the GoDaddy website builder automatically optimises for the mobile version of the site as well, which ensure that your pages look as good as on the phone as it does on a computer.
We could go on and on waxing lyrical about the GoDaddy website builder, but perhaps the best thing you could do is try it out for yourself — GoDaddy offers a free one month trial, and it costs $8.00 / month for a personal plan thereafter (and if you decide that you want to put your site up on the internet, we think we know somewhere that you can get a domain.) It’s almost a necessity to have to have an online presence in 2017, and if you don’t know where to start, this is certainly a good stepping stone to greater things.
sg.godaddy.com
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