How to manage a website

You have decided to open a website to promote your business or your personal project, however, you are having difficulties as you are at the first experiences and you do not know how to carry out an online project? Don’t worry: this tutorial is for you.

In the next paragraphs, I will show you, in fact, how to manage a website, whether your idea concerns a personal website or a corporate one based on the sale of products and services. I’ll also explain what the law says about running a school website. For each step, I will list valid services for domain registration and hosting service, which always represents the first step towards creating a site, as well as proven platforms to shape your project.

For sure you don’t want to waste any more time and get straight to the point, so take a few minutes of free time and find out what I have to tell you: you will see that several methods have been developed to make managing a website very simple, so you will be immediately in able to understand what to do independently. I wish you a good read and good luck for everything!

Index

• How to best manage a website
  • How to manage a personal website
  • How to manage a corporate website
  • How to manage a school website
  • Other useful tips

How to best manage a website

To create a website, some basic steps are necessary, which I will summarize in the following paragraphs. If you want to know how to best manage a website, you can only start from here.

How to manage a personal website

Are you creating a personal website, perhaps a blog in which you talk about the topics that interest you or a portfolio in which you illustrate your projects? Then this is the section of the guide that interests you most closely.

First of all, you will need to register your domain (if desired, free ones are also available ), that is the address to which your site should correspond, and buy a hosting space, that is the online space in which all the files that compose it will be hosted. .

To give you a practical example, I will show you how to manage a website with Aruba, a very famous Italian company that operates in the fields of Web hosting, cloud and online practices, which offers one of the best hosting services around. Among the many solutions offered, if you are a beginner with Web development, you can choose to rely on SuperSite and start working on your site without having to write a single line of code.

More specifically, SuperSite Trial allows you to try the SuperSite Professional option for free for 30 days and create sites, including multilingual, on a third-level domain, including blogs and e-commerce, optimized for smartphones and tablets, designed for SEO, with Cookie Policy. You will also be able to have 24/7 assistance and, at the end of the trial, decide whether to purchase the aforementioned SuperSite Professional plan, or SuperSite Easy. The SuperSite Professional plan includes a second level domain, 5 mailboxes, DV SSL certificate in addition to everything that is already included in the Trial version, at a price of € 39 + VAT the first year of use, and then pass to € 99 per year + VAT upon renewal. If you want to save a little, there is also the SuperSite Easy plan, which includes a second level domain, 5 mailboxes, DV SSL certificate and 24/7 assistance for € 39 + VAT the first year, and then at € 49 + VAT upon renewal. To know how to do it in detail, read my guide on how to build a website with Aruba.

If you want more customization possibilities, you could instead opt for the use of a CMS (Content Management System) to be installed on your hosting space. With this in mind, I can only recommend WordPress, which is the most used CMS in the world, perfect for personal sites and blogs (but also e-commerce, if combined with the right plugins) and customizable in every respect thanks to the large amount of themes. and plugins available.

To have an all-in-one solution that includes hosting, domain and ready-to-use WordPress installation, you can also contact Aruba in this case, which offers various solutions in this regard: Aruba WordPress Hosting and WordPress Hosting Aruba Managed. The first leaves the user with the various tasks of managing and updating the CMS, themes and any installed plugins. The second, on the other hand, provides for the automatic updating of the system, provides a platform optimized specifically for WordPress, technical support, the ability to perform backups on demand, many e-mail boxes and even the PEC.

Managed WordPress Hosting is also available in two versions. The first is Smart Managed WordPress Hosting which includes, among other things, a dedicated 1GB MySQL database, unlimited disk space (SSD), optimized platform, DV SSL certificate, domain and is designed to accommodate an average traffic of 50,000 visitors per month. Its price is € 29 + VAT the first year, which will become € 79 + VAT per year upon renewal. Then there is the Premium Managed WordPress Hosting plan which offers a 2GB MySQL database, unlimited disk space (SSD), optimized platform, DV SSL certificate and much more, for traffic of around 500,000 visitors per month, at a cost of€ 39 + VAT the first year, which will then become € 129 + VAT per year upon renewal. Finally, the Top Managed WordPress Hosting plan includes the services of the Premium plan, but it’s best if you expect heavy website traffic, from around 1,000,000 visitors per month. Its cost is € 119 + VAT the first year, which will become € 229 + VAT per year upon renewal. To learn more, read my Aruba WordPress hosting guide.

Once this is done, you can start customizing the look and feel of your website and publishing content and images. To learn more, read my guides on how to choose a hosting for your website, on how to create a blog with WordPress, then on how to manage a blog with WordPress and also on how to create a site with WordPress.

If, on the other hand, you prefer to open a blog completely free without having to commit to the purchase of hosting, domain and the installation of a CMS, you can rely on well-known platforms such as WordPress.com and Google’s Blogger, which however offer some obvious limitations in terms of personalization and monetization compared to sites on domain and paid hosting. The domain will also be third level ( tuonome.nomepiattaforma.estensione) and not second level ( tuonome.estensione). Anyway, if you want to know more, I recommend you read my guides on how to create a free site with WordPress and how to create a blog with Blogger.

How to manage a corporate website

Are you willing to get your professional business online, but you still don’t know exactly how to manage a corporate website? No problem, here are some useful “tips” in this regard.

Meanwhile, as for all sites of any type, it is necessary to start by purchasing a domain and hosting (for obvious reasons, I do not recommend free platforms for a professional site). Then you have to choose which solutions to rely on for the construction of the site itself.

For example, if your intention is to create an e-commerce, I highly recommend you try Shopify: a service widely tested and used all over the world, to create and manage your e-commerce from your desktop, smartphone and tablet comfortably, in great simplicity and with everything you need to manage products, orders and shipments.

Getting started with Shopify is as easy as creating an account with any other online service – first, though, you need to choose a plan to join. Keep in mind that, in any case, you have 14 days to take a free trial of Shopify, for which you don’t even need to register a credit card or a payment method.

Shopify offers the Basic Shopify plan which includes the possibility of creating a website with e-commerce and blog, insertion of unlimited products, 2 staff accounts, integration with social channels to take advantage of the possibilities offered by social commerce, manual creation of orders and discount codes, SSL certificate, fraud analysis, 24/7 support in English and much more for $ 29 a month. Then there is the Shopify plan which, in addition to what is provided within the Basic one, provides 5 staff accounts, the possibility of inserting gift vouchers and obtaining reports on sales and user behavior on the site. Its cost is $ 79 per month. Finally, if you believe your needs are already structured, you can opt for the Advanced Shopify plan, with 15 staff accounts, advanced reporting, shipping rates calculated at checkout and everything else that is also found in the other two plans. , for a cost of $ 299 per month. More info here.

After thinking about the plan that you think is most suitable for your needs, all you have to do is reach the official Shopify website and register, or download the app from the Google Play Store if you have an Android device, or from the App Store, if you use an iPhone or iPad, then start using your free trial period.

You can access your virtual store and start uploading products from the control panel: for all the details on starting your online business and managing it, read my guide on how to create an ecommerce with Shopify.

As an alternative to Shopify, you can also easily take advantage of the solutions I told you about in the previous chapter, whether you want to create a “standard” company site or whether you want to open an e-commerce: in this regard, SuperSite by Aruba allows also to create online stores and manage products and orders with ease, while the Aruba WordPress Hosting also includes the use of the WooCommerce plugin, which allows you to transform WordPress into a perfect platform for e-commerce.

Specifically, the Managed Aruba WooCommerce Hosting service automatically deals with the management of major problems and site updates and includes the domain, unlimited disk space (SSD), pre-installed DV SSL certificate, optimized platform, up to 10 PEC accounts and many others, at a cost of € 124.50 + VAT the first year, which increases to € 249 + VAT annually upon renewal. Read more here.

If you want to deepen the subject further, also read my guides on the best e-commerce platforms, on how to open an online store and on how to manage an ecommerce.

How to manage a school website

Maybe you work in the education sector and would like to open a website to give lessons or that is a point of reference for students, so you are wondering how to manage a school website.

In this case, important clarifications must be made: a school website, in the true sense of the word, can only be created and managed by a Public Administration (PA) , as specified in the directive that establishes the Guidelines for websites. of the PA. In particular cases, it could be the PA itself that decides to make use of the collaboration of an agency or external collaborators, through public tender or direct request.

If, on the other hand, what you want to do is simply spread some notional and educational content, you can treat your project as a personal website, then read the dedicated chapter, within this guide.

If, on the other hand, your intention is also to sell courses, workshops and webinars, read the chapter in which I tell you about how to manage a corporate website. To learn more, also check out my guide on how to do a webinar.

Other useful tips

Now that you understand how to manage a website, I can also give you other useful tips, to achieve your goals even better.

Meanwhile, try to organize the contents within your website in the most intuitive way possible for the user who will visit it, also depending on the type of site. In the event that it was a blog in which there are mainly texts, make sure that a fair number of the latest published appear on the Home page. If, on the other hand, there are many images (for example it is a photographic or artistic portfolio), organize them by themes and divide them into categories. If you have a personal website, also curate your bio on the About / About Us page.

Maybe you don’t know it, yet, if you want, you can also make money with a blog or a personal website: in this regard, read my guide on how to do link building.

If you want to manage an e-commerce website, remember to separate the shop area of products and services from general information. Choose a clear and intuitive graphic rendering, then think that you can also integrate a blog into the project.

In case you find yourself dealing with a commission from a PA, for the creation of a school website, keep in mind that you may need to provide many links for downloading materials and documents necessary for students.

In any case, remember to use precise keywords in the texts present within the pages of the website, strictly linked to your proposals and your business. You can use special tools to search for them, such as the Keyword Planner, made available by Google, Ubersuggest or SeoZoom. All this will help you with regards to positioning and indexing on search engines. To understand how to best organize the “backbone” of the site, read my guide on how to structure a website.

Another important thing you should do, once the website is finished, is to upload its sitemap to Google Search Console. In this way you will be able to monitor its performance, but not only: you will be able to discover errors or other disreputable sites that link to yours, taking away its authority. Then proceed to remove those links.

Use tools like Google Analytics to keep track of what’s happening online, then try to promote your business using marketing services, such as Google Ads. In relation to this topic, read my guide on how to do online marketing.

What else to say? One could continue to talk about this topic for hours, in which, among other things, it is necessary to continue experimenting and studying, to be sure to always offer its users the best solutions. For my part, I can therefore only invite you to carefully read all the insights that I have linked to you during this tutorial and commit yourself as much as possible: you will see that, if you do, you will be able to obtain good results.