What's Involved in Creating a Unique Custom Website?

Getting a unique custom-built website that stand outs from your competition, involves lots of time and dedication. You might be overwhelmed with all the different approaches, and options available to you. Below we will cover all the various things required to getting started with a custom-built website.

Website Design

User Experience (UX)

User experience considers a person's emotions, when interfacing with a website. It is what a person's feels, while they interact with your website. Your website should provide a positive user experience that fulfills the user's needs. Over the years, Google has updated its search engine. Each update, Google has been geared towards websites that provide user focused and user-friendly content. To rank higher on Google, your website should provide high quality engaging content.

User Interface (UI)

If you have ever found yourself on a website, where every page looks/ different, you are unable to understand what they are offering, or how to navigate through it, it's most likely that website, has a bad user interface design. Your website interface is what the users sees, when they access your website. There are various ways to creating a user interface design. Our favorite method is simply sketching on a whiteboard, what a website should look, then developing a small simple prototype that reflects the design structure. A prototype is a very small minimal implantation of what the website should look like. Having a prototype allows us not only to visualize the website design, but also to incorporate what the website feels like (UX).

Website Development

A website is composed of various layers. In a nutshell, the front end is what the user sees, the back end is where all the data processing happens, the database is where all the data is stored. Combining all 4 allows us to host

Front End

The front end of your website is simply what the user sees. It reflects the user interface and user experience designs.

Back End

The back end contains all your website logic.

Database

The database is your websites data warehouse. There are various database options available. At AHT Cloud, depending on your website, we prefer to use either MySQL or PostgreSQL. Since your database contains all your data, it is vital to have it on a database server rather than on your local server.

Website Hosting

The type of server is completely dependent on what your website does. Below are the common types of servers available.

Shared Website Hosting

A shared hosting is a type of website hosting where your website, shares a single, physical server with many other users. Each user is allocated a section of the server. Shared website hosting is the most cost-effect way to get your website running, however, websites hosted on shared servers, are not sufficient for sites with high traffic.

Virtual Private Server VPS

A virtual private server is one big powerful physical server, that utilizes virtualization to provide multiple virtual servers. The difference between shared hosting and VPS, is that with VPS, you won't be sharing RAM, CPU or other data with other users.

Dedicated Website Server

A dedicated server is the opposite of shared hosting. With a dedicated server you have one dedicated server that is reserved for your website. You are not sharing anything, with anyone. Dedicated hosting is more expensive but gives you 100% control over server.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is like VPS. One big difference between cloud and VPS hosting is that cloud hosting utilizes many different physical servers, instead of being a segment on one single physical server. The benefit to this is that it gives you more flexibility and guarantees performance when experiencing a surge in traffic. It also allows you to easily spawn more server resources when you need them. There is no risk for your website to go down, when one physical server fails.

Add-Ons

CMS – Content Management System

A website can either be hardcoded, or allows to dynamically generate, modify and delete content. A hardcoded website will require development to modify the content. A content management system allows you to control your website content. Depending on what content your website has, a content management system allows you to manage what is displayed. If your website has a blog, with a CMS you can create, modify and delete any blog on the fly.

Contact AHT Cloud - Calgary Web Design | Calgary SEO Services if you need advice, digital marketing help, web design, hosting or seo services. For more information, send an email or give us a call. 1-587-834-6567 | support@ahtcloud.com | https://www.ahtcloud.com