If you want to create a website in Ghana without breaking the bank and coding then you are on the right website because that is what this post aims to help you achieve.
The percentage of the population using the internet has been increasing rapidly in Ghana over the past few years. This has resulted in the unarguable fact that, it has never been more important for a business in Ghana to have a web presence. And so, many have picked an interest in how to create a website for their business.
While we know a website is a quick and easy way for a business to expand its reach, develop its brand and keep pace with competitors, If you are just starting out, building a website can seem daunting, and those lacking firsthand experience may feel lost. Luckily, with the right guidance and information, it’s easily possible to build a straightforward business website yourself.
In this brief article, we will outline to you simple steps you can take on how to create a website all by yourself. We will be looking at; Why do you need to design a website? the two ways to create a website and the step-by-step guide to creating a website. Keep reading to learn more
Why do you need to create a website in Ghana?
A business in this modern age in Ghana definitely needs an online presence to build credibility and increase its brand. Some of the reasons to create a website for your business are discussed below
1. To build stronger bonds with your customers
When potential client visits your website, they can find the answers to the questions they have automatically without you even lifting a finger. Also, clients might need to seek information from you to clarify any of their fears and doubts about doing business with you and your website can readily alleviate those worries.
2. Advertising and Exposure
Having a website automatically enables you to rank much better in search engines like Google. This leads to free exposure for your business. Many potential clients simply started out by searching for what they wanted on Google. And if it is your website that comes up and you have what they want, that’s almost a guaranteed sale for you. This also helps you to reach out to clients from outside Ghana. In other words, taking your business global.
3. Business Emails
You probably haven’t know how many deals you’ve lost because the email you sent came from yourbusiness@ gmail.com.
If your business uses a free email service for business, not only might your emails be labelled as spam and filtered out of inboxes, but you might even be blocked when signing up for offers and services. Having a website saves you all this stress.
But the business purpose is not the only reason why you can create a website. In fact, it’s just one of many reasons.
You might be a photographer who would love to showcase your photos on a website or a comedian who will like to share your jokes and other humorous things on the internet. Even perhaps you’re a lady who would love to write your personal stories on fashion, skincare or beauty on a fashion blog, or a student or graduate willing to make money online by blogging or through writing and content creation in any of the various niches.
You can see, there are plenty of interesting reasons why you should create a website in Ghana. Whatever you’re doing, or willing to do, you can create a website for it.
The ways to create a website in Ghana
1. Through WordPress
If you’re a coder or programmer with vast knowledge of web creation and design, you might as well choose this route. The benefit it gives is that you will have all the controls of your website under you.
But it requires a lot of technical expertise and skills. This is why a majority of people choose to follow the easier route; using website building software or website builders.
2. Coding
You can use programming languages like PHP, Javascript and the like to design a beautiful website that can appeal to people when they visit it. If you don’t have the knowledge you can learn it.
3. Using Website Builders
Going through a website builder saves you the stress of time and all the technical nonsense. You can create your website in a matter of minutes by taking this route, because, you don’t need any HTML or coding knowledge to create your website. Everything is set up in a ‘dummy learning’ format.
4. Hiring an expert website designer or developer
Even though this is the easiest way to create a website in Ghana, it is the most expensive because it requires that you outsource it to experts. You can give a freelance website developer or an agency to get your website started.
How to design a website in Ghana using WordPress
A lot of people these days use WordPress to create their websites. In fact, two-thirds of all the websites and blogs you see online are designed using WordPress. Why? Because WordPress is a free and open-source CMS (content management system) written in PHP and paired with a MySQL/MariaDB database.
In simple terms, WordPress is a free and open platform; a website builder, where you can easily create websites for your businesses and blogs. It is the best out there.
The beauty of WordPress is that there are a lot of features on it including templates where you can just plug in your information and create a website, input plugins, a variety of themes, and a host of others.
Step 1: Define the purpose of your website
The first important question you are to answer before you create a website in Ghana is “Why“, What is the purpose of the website? and what do you aim to achieve?
If you choose a niche that is highly competitive, then you will find it difficult to target the keywords in that niche, because there will exist already established websites in that niche. You need to try to make your website as unique as possible to be able to succeed online
Therefore, try to choose a defined path for your website to follow.
Step 2: Choose a proper domain name
It’s the proper thing to pick a website’s name (and thus your domain name) around either the name of your niche or organization.
Your domain name is the address of the website that users can use to locate your website online. When they type it into their browser’s search bar, it will lead them to your website. Some examples of domains are www.google.com, www.facebook.com, www.legit.ng etc.
You also need to note that every website domain has an extension, such as .com,.gh, .net, etc. When you want to buy your domain, you will need to add an extension.
The domain extension you choose determines the cost you will incur. Some domains are more expensive than others.
Your domain name can also be a phrase that’s associated with the niche you have chosen in step 1, but with some added words for better brandability.Doing some keyword research can also be helpful.
In short, a good domain name should be
•Brandable– Very unique! Like nothing else that’s out there in the market
•Easy to type and recall – you don’t want people to be getting it difficult to remember to spell your site’s name
•Including your niche-related keywords. For instance, if you do anything with fashion, it would be cool to have “fashion” somewhere in the name of the site.
When choosing a domain name to create a website in Ghana, you should consider your target audience, if your target audience is then you should consider using a .gh or .com.gh domain extension but if you are targeting a larger audience then you should go for .com extension if it is available.
Step 3: Check the availability of your website domain name
After you are done choosing a domain name, you will need to check if it is available on a domain registrar to check if it is available, if it’s available, then hurray, but if it’s not available, you will need to look for another name or domain extension.
Step 4: Choose your plan
After choosing a domain name, the next necessary task for you to perform is to choose a website hosting plan, you need to choose the one that best suits your website needs. If you are just creating a small business website then you can choose the WordPress starter plan to get started.
Step 5: Create a Truehost account
A form will be provided for you online to fill in the details of your website.
Step 5: Enter your billing
Before making payment you will be shown the invoice for what you have accumulated in your cart. If you have chosen the WordPress starter package, you will be shown 60 GHC or $ 5 in your invoice.
But if you initially added a domain to your cart, the sum of the hosting and domain will be displayed to you to pay.
The best Truehost web hosting plan for you to create a website in Ghana
When your website is still small and yet to have a reasonable amount of traffic, you can start with the Truehost WordPress starter plan, because it provides you with all the basic features you will need for your small website in Ghana.
How to install WordPress and configure your blog settings
The credentials of your website Cpanel and others will be sent to you when paying for the hosting and domain name in WordPress. From your Cpanel, you will be able the control your website.
The Cpanel serves as the administration dashboard of your website. Your hosting providers are supposed to create an account for you and send to you.
When you enter the password and username sent to you by Truehost in your email you can access the dashboard, where you will be able to install WordPress. There is a software called Softaculous app installer that helps to install different kinds of CMS ( Content Management Systems).
To get to the Softaculous app installer, you should scroll down to the software section, where you will see the WordPress manager by Softaculous, when you click on it you see the option to install WordPress.
Installing WordPress takes just a few minutes to work and then you will be on your way to getting your website ready. Click on the install icon to install WordPress, but before the installation, you will be required to input some information about your website.
The information you will need to fill in is displayed in the image below
You will fill in your site heading, your password, username, and webmail and you will select the plugins and theme for your website. If you didn’t select a theme, the twenty twenty-three themes would be installed by default on your website.
Input the login details you used while installing WordPress on your Cpanel dashboard to access your WordPress dashboard.
Step 6:Install your WordPress website theme
The image below shows the dashboard of WordPress, which is where you will be able to make all the necessary formatting and editing of your website to your desired looks.
Dashboard: This is WordPress’s general home for managing and viewing your site. It includes step-by-step actions, a pile of your current site contents and recommendations for additional features.
Posts: This is where you can add and manage your site posts.
Media: This is your media library, where all your uploaded images and videos are stored.
Pages: Where you can add and manage pages on your website.
Comments: Here you can moderate, regulate, respond to, or screen comments if they’re enabled.
Appearance: Your main hub for editing the theme of your website.
Themes: This is where you can browse and install free and premium themes.
Customise: Where you can change the style of your chosen theme. Many of the other submenu items can be edited here.
Plugins: Where you can manage your website plugins.
Installed Plugins: This is where you can view, activate, deactivate or delete plugins that are already installed on your site.
Users: This is the place where you can manage your password and user profile, as well as view or add team members and manage their access level to your WordPress admin.
Settings: Manage specific options for your WordPress website.
The theme you decide to use will determine the way your website appears, if your theme is beautiful, your website will be beautiful and vice versa. So you need to choose a theme that has the features you want to use to create your website in Ghana.
In WordPress, you can use a free or a premium website for your design, if you choose the free version, your customization will be limited compared to the premium version.
Step 7: Install your WordPress website plugin
Another crucial tool that you must install on your website is the plugin. Plugins improve the functionality of your website. All you need to do is choose the right plugin if you want to duplicate a function or feature that you see on another website on your own.
As plugin form functions, e-commerce, a table of contents, forms, e-learning, page construction, and many more capabilities are available. The plugin directory for WordPress has thousands of free plugins.
Click the plugin button to get to the directory where you may search for the plugin you want to install. There are free and premium plugins, similar to themes.
Step 8: Customize your WordPress website display
This section allows you to customise your website and make all the necessary modifications you need to make your website meet your desires.
Click on the customise icon in your dashboard to change the header, background image, menus, widgets and other features of your website. The level of customization depends on the theme you chose and if it is a paid or free theme.
After installing a theme and or a plugin, you will need to activate it before it starts working on your blog.
Essential plugins you need to install on your website in Ghana
Plugins are software that adds functionality to your website as mentioned above, therefore, you will need to install some of them on your website to improve the performance of your website.
1. Yoast SEO
You need an SEO plugin in your website to make your website optimised for search engines. Yoast helps in performing tasks like submitting backlinks and giving SEO on-page suggestions.
2. Elementor
Have you ever visited a website and see beautiful images, colours and outlays? That can be achieved with a page builder. The page builder bas templates that you can use for this purpose.
Elementor can help you in designing a beautiful homepage, sales page or squeeze page.
3. WP-Cache
For your website to be fast and optimised you can use this plugin to achieve that.
4. Smush
Having so many images on your website can reduce its speed, therefore to make it optimised, you can use smush to reduce the size of the images.
5. Jetpack
It helps to monitor your website and also improves its speed.
6. WP Form
This plugin help to capture information on your website, assuming you want to create a survey form or get data from users, these plugins will help you do so.
7. Optinmonster
You can use this plugin to get emails from your blog visitors.
8. Google Analytics
You can get data from your website through Google Analytics, this data helps you to make pre-informed decisions that can make your business thrive.
WordPress website settings you need to know
You may make some little adjustments to your blog that will significantly improve it. In this part, we’ll talk about a few of these settings.
1. Permalinks
A permalink is the name of the link to your blog’s articles and pages. That is significant since customers and potential visitors will use your permalink structure to access your website.
You should use the post name structure so that the link displays the post’s title. This can make it easier for readers to understand the point of your blog post, which might persuade them to visit your website.
But, users will simply see your website’s domain name if you use a number, for instance, and won’t be able to understand its function.
2. Your website address ( www or non-www)
Don’t use www and non-www on the same site; your website’s settings should be consistent. Your website should adhere to consistency throughout. Since none is superior to the others, you must choose one to utilize in order to maintain order.
3. Set up your blog menu
You can step your website menu by clicking on the Appearance icon and then you will be led to the menu where you can create a menu by adding pages to it and saving it.
Your website menu ought to contain pages of your website you want users to locate easily, which means you need to create pages before you will be able to create a website menu.
As seen above, you can adjust the pages of your website to the position that you desire.
4. Create your blog’s main pages
There are about four pages that every website is supposed to have, we will discuss them below.
1. Home page
When someone accesses your website using your domain link, they initially view the home page. Because you created your website with WordPress, you will need to change the settings to make a page your home page.
2. About US page
The About page should contain details about what your blog is all about and what you stand for. Some people go further to explain their missions, vision and how they started.
3. Contact Us page
This page should contain how you want visitors to contact you, you can decide to use a form or display your address and contact details.
4. Terms of service page
You are to use this page to tell people how you operate and how their data is safe with them.
Step 9: Create your website homepage
To create an aesthetically beautiful homepage on WordPress, you will need a website page builder like SeedProd, Divi, or Elementor. A standard page builder includes themes, banners, and other tools that you may utilise.
Any of the aforementioned page builders can be used to design the page, but Elementor is the most well-liked.
Step 10: Launch your completed website
The quickest and simplest step is to launch your website when you’ve completed modifying the content of your website and adding any extra plugins.
Start adding engaging content to your website once you’ve published the important administrative pages. With your niche- or business-related information, you must make your pages visually appealing. You must also make it a goal to keep producing fresh content on a regular basis.
Moreover, if blogging is your thing, make sure every post has at least one image. This not only provides your visitors something to share on social media, but it also makes your material more enticing.
Step 11: Backup your Site website in Ghana
You need to back up your website since your content is your most important asset. Doing this guarantees that you won’t have to restart anything in the event of a crash.
If you don’t back up your content, plugins, and affiliate links, it can be difficult for you to recover quickly. Your web provider needs to provide an option if you don’t have the time to frequently back up your website.
Step 12: Promote your Website
The crucial final step is to market your website. After all, you made it in order to make money.
You have a lot of possibilities, but there are only two ways to advertise your new website: SEO (search engine optimization) is used first to make sure your content’s title, description, and body text contain pertinent keywords that will make your website to perform well on search engines.
Second, spend some time promoting your website using social media forums and a consistent email newsletter.
To increase your social standing and visibility, you may also think about posting as a guest and leaving comments on other blogs, forums, and communities.
Create a website in Ghana with OLITT
You can create a free website with Olitt in Ghana using the following steps.
Visit www.olitt.com
Click on the create a website button at the top right corner of the home page.
You are directed to log in.
How to create an account
The login in page will give you options to log in or create an account. If you are new to the platform, you are required to create an account but if you already have an account, you will just fill in your login details to continue.
You will need to fill in the following information to create an account
- First name
- Last name
- Email address
- Password
After filling in the above information, an email will be sent to your account to verify the account.
Select a category to create a website in Ghana
You will be directed to the design homepage where you can start your design swiftly.
Select the category you want, the templates are categorised to help you find the one you want to use easily.
In our case we will want to design an online store, therefore we will click on the online store category to get started
Create a store
When you click on the theme you want, you will be directed to this page indicating that your website is live.
Click on the “connect your own domain” to connect your domain if you have one already or you purchase another one if you don’t have one yet.
You will input your domain into the space provided above.
Billing
The billing session shows you the invoice for all the transactions carried out on your online store.
Search engine
In this section, you will be required to add your online store description and write a website title.
Payment method settings
You can add a payment method you want people to use on your platform to make purchases. This feature is available for premium users.
Product upload
You will be able to upload images of the products you want to sell on your website in Nigeria.
You can also customise the text on your online store to your desired taste.
Edit text
When you want to edit text, you are to highlight the text you will love to edit and then change whatever you desire
The following are some of the changes you can make to your text, you can:
- bold
- Italic
- Underline
- Strikethrough
- Add hyperlink
- Change alignment
- Change colour
- Pick fonts in that order.
Upload or remove images
You can select image files from your computer or drive to upload them to the website. But if you like their image, you are at liberty to use it that way.
How to add integration
Olitt has plugins you can integrate with your website to increase its functionality.
One of which is the Google analytics tool. This tool makes it possible for webmasters to gain insight into the behaviour of their site visitors.
The cost of using Olitt
You can create a free website with Olitt. But you have very limited features
If you want to enjoy everything Olitt has to offer, you will use the 1-year plan that costs only 334 GHC only.
See the features you will enjoy in the image below.
Understand OLITT website features
OLITT has excellent features that can help you create a website in Ghana that is functional and beautiful.
One of the best customer service teams you can imagine, Olitt responds to customers right away.
You can choose from hundreds of templates on it as well. To make it simple for you to find the template you need, the templates are categorized.
It is also incredibly inexpensive and simple to use.
We will now talk in more detail about the other features that Olitt offers.
1. DNS Management
Most website builders charge extra for DNS management, however, Olitt offers it free to all of its users.
In addition to a free domain and other interesting features on their platform, it is one of the freebies you will receive.
2. Payment Gateway
If you’re creating a website for an online store where users must make purchases, You must provide customers with a payment gateway, which is a type of payment option.
Your consumers can choose from three payment gateways offered by Olitt. They now have a wide range of possibilities ( This could increase your conversion rate ). These are the payment gateways:
- Flutterwave
- PayPal
- Stripe
3. Global CDN
The speed at which a webpage load depends on how close a server is to the user. By utilizing a Global CDN (Content Delivery Network) with over 44 Pops, Olitt enables users to always be directed to the nearest servers.
In other words, Olitt’s technology makes webpages created using it quickly.
4. Custom Code
For those that require sophisticated customization in their site design, Olitt offers a solution.
Those with experience can add JavaScript codes to their websites to give them a special flair.
5. Marketing
You must now find a technique to expose your goods to the appropriate customers if you want to make any money.
You can carry out A/B testing with OLITT. This is a good way of saying that you can easily experiment with your shopping experience and maximize the conversion rate without resorting to trial and error.
Additionally, you may use the email features to collect emails from clients, cultivate a relationship with them, and increase sales steadily through repeat business.
6. Analytics
What you can’t quantify, you can’t scale.
Although that is a marketing adage, it also applies to your online store.
You can incorporate Google Analytics into your website inside the OLITT store which can then help you to monitor how customers are interacting with your store or blog.
also, you will have access to a thorough sales report through Google analytics Use OLITT Shop Reports to view the item total, adjustment total, and sales total of your orders over a specified time period in each currency you support.
There are other heat maps.
The user flows, motions, clicks, scroll events, and keystrokes are tracked and visually displayed in a stylish manner.
To comprehend behaviours and funnels, combine HotJar and OLITT.
Conclusion
Explained above are the two easy ways to create a website in Ghana without having to break the bank or learn to code. With WordPress, the process is seamless and easy to learn, while with a website builder like OLITT, you are given themes and a lot of integrations for free.
However, if you want more benefits you will need to subscribe to OLITT’s yearly plan which costs as little as 337 GHC.
If you want to design your website by yourself ( which is cost-effective), you can start by buying Hosting now or using OLITT.
