It goes without saying that the internet was one of the best inventions of the last 100 years, which has changed everyone’s lives as we knew them back in the 90’s and early 00’s. It has given many people the chance to pursue a career in what they really care about and by creating websites that can be turned into extremely profitable businesses.

For this reason, especially in today’s times, there are more and more people every day that are looking to create a website, both for personal and business reasons – this is great! However, as with starting to fund your time and money into everything, you need to be double sure that what you are doing is a good path to pursue. With this in mind, here are some of the main things you need to check, double check and even treble check before starting a website.

#1 Market Research into Your Website

The first step is to see what the demand is like for the type of website you are looking to create. Dubbed ‘market research’ you need to formulate an idea of your main competition, the typical amount of traffic they get and more to see how much demand there is for your new website’s category. What can help with this is looking at:

• Google Trends – This allows you to see the competition for any search phrase over the last few years, seeing where the traffic came from and more – it is a great tool to see if it is worth making a website into your niche/category.
• Google search – Googling crucial keywords is simple and the most effective way to determine what websites are your main competition, and research into the content they produce, products/services they sell, themes they use and more.
• Alexa – Alexa, a company from Amazon, ranks websites based on a multitude of factors. From this, you can search your competition’s websites on here to see if the website’s ranking is increasing or decreasing (and detemrine why this is the case).

#2 Check Your Domain for .com, .co.uk, .org and .net

Obviously, this point is dependent on where in the world you are located and what location of web users you are looking to target. But, take for example myself who lives in the UK, if I was to start a website, I would look to buy:

• .com – This is the most used domain extension for websites making it the one to have. This is the extension your website would have, with the below generally redirecting to the .com:
  • .co.uk – After this, it is important to take the local extension for your country. In my case, this would be .co.uk.
  • .net – .net is popular and is still worth purchasing.
  • After .net comes .org, which is a useful domain to have to ‘future proof’ your domain for years to come.

Although there will be a cost to the domains, it is neccessary to get them as early as possible to prevent any problems you might face having to transfer domains and websites over if you only managed to get the domain of your choice later on into your website’s life.