7 hurdles to crafting a website and how to overcome them in just 4 days

1. Designing a website - Good web design matters and you want your website to be flexible, so it can easily be viewed across various screens and devices. Your website provides an information architecture for all of your content, so it needs to help your visitors quickly and easily find a wide variety of resources in the form of images, text and video. Your website may also serve as an eCommerce portal, where visitors can view products and services, read reviews, add items to their cart and easily pay you. When you look at other modern websites, you may wonder how you could possibly design a functional and visually appealing site without becoming a graphic artist or diving into the latest web technologies such as WordPress, HTML, JavaScript, cascading style sheets (CSS) or user interface (UI) frameworks such as Material Design, Angular, Bootstrap or React. The key to success is to leverage professionally designed templates that are designed from the ground up to be flexible and responsive, and that can easily accommodate all kinds of content, from customer case studies and blogs, to high-definition video backgrounds, photo galleries, and online stores.
   
   Start with your objectives: who do you want to reach with your message? This will help guide your website content and design choices. Once you have clearly defined your audience and message, defining your brand, choosing a website hosting service and choosing a responsive design will be much easier. And the great news is that if you ever decide to change your website design, layout or functionality, modern web platforms make it easy to re-publish your website and eCommerce store with updated branding, layout, colors, and themes.
   
   
2. Choosing a name - Why is it so hard to select a name for your website? There are nearly 1.2 billion websites out there already and it is really challenging to find a name that is short, memorable, and available across so many social media channels.
   
   Choose a keyword: select a search phrase that you expect your audience will type into search engines, then start looking at interesting combinations of words and phrases related to that search phrase. There are some great tools available such as InstantDomainSearch and NameCheckr you can use to find a website name that will work across the social media channels where your audience goes.
   
   
3. Creating a logo - Your website logo is a shorthand representation of your brand. It helps viewers feel a connection to your site and navigate their open browser tabs using favicons. The color, font, text and imagery in your logo can be an effective way to build your following, convey your approach and goals. Hiring a designer to create a logo can be expensive and the hardest part is to give them clear direction to guide their design process.
   
   Get clear on your message: decide on a message, then choose a name as described above. Once you have a message and a name for your website, get inspired by using logo generators such as Logaster and RenderForest.
   
   
4. Finding the Time - When you ask other people how long it takes to design and build a website, you will find that it is very common to spend 3-6 months or even longer. Modern website builders like Craft A Website have reduced that time to just a few days with dozens of pre-built designs, responsive templates templates for your blog or eCommerce store. The real challenge is getting to clarity about your audience and your message. By breaking the process down, you can get your first website up and running faster than you could imagine. In as little as 30 minutes per day over the course of 4 days, you can get your first website up and then make changes and improvements to your website right from your tablet.
   
   Start in 30 minutes: block 30 minutes on your calendar each day for 4 consecutive days. Choose a time that works best for you in the morning, at lunch, or in the evening. Then follow this 4-day checklist.
   
   
5. Knowing what to say - Knowing what to say – and to whom – can take time to get right. Getting to a clear, concise message that will resonate with your audience and lead them to action is a process that takes time. Focusing on these important elements up front will help you craft a website that will help you have a positive impact and grow your audience.
   
   Understand your audience: the good news is that you do not have to perfect your messaging in order to start. The key is to clearly define your audience. Who do you want to reach? What are their interests, needs, challenges and fears? Try several approaches to understand and empathize with them. Capture their sentiments in their own words using posts from social media, questions in online forums, quotes from news articles, results of research studies, photos, videos and interviews. Start by addressing their most urgent needs, answering their questions, and solving their problems with content, products and services on your website. Listen to and interact with your audience where they gather on social media sites. Demonstrate your interest and skill through good follow up questions, helpful resources, blog posts and videos. As you share free content from your website, more and more people will start to visit you site and begin to trust you. Once you have confidence that you can solve a critical problem or challenge for your audience, you can share testimonial quotes, videos, and photos to increase awareness and have a more positive impact. Practice explaining what you do in 60 words, 30 words and 10 words. Try to get clear and concise. Ask your audience what they think about your message and try to describe what you do in their words. Then iterate and improve. Continuously repeat this process. The important thing is to start.
   
   
6. Creating content - One of the most difficult parts about content creation is knowing what to create. The other difficult thing is how to create and publish it. You are not alone. Every website faces these challenges of creating a steady stream of high-quality content.
   
   What would you want? If you were your audience, what would be most helpful? As you listen to and interact with your audience, pay attention to themes that you hear and then create content to address their biggest questions, fears and challenges. What is your audience thinking and feeling? How could you help them? Start by looking at resources and content that your audience already consumes on Amazon, Google and social media. Take a look at top-trending content on BuzzSumo and answers on Quora.
   
   
7. Making the decision - Choosing an audience to focus your time and effort, to develop content and build a following is hard because it removes other possibilities. What if you choose the wrong audience?
   
   Pick something that interests you and others for at least the next 5 years. You will naturally enjoy putting effort into something you find meaningful. As you start to help others with this same need or interest, it will give you a positive mental boost and you can ask them to share their success in order to help you reach an even larger audience. So how can you know if an audience exists? Look at 5-year history on Google Trends for your target keyword to validate interest. Look at Udemy to see if there are popular courses on your topic. If your interests change or a new opportunity emerges, modern hosting platforms make it easy for you to rename, rebrand and update your website. The most important thing is to start.

Get started today with the 4-Day Website Challenge.