How to Build a Website with No Code in 2024

so the days of having to know how to code and write HTML in CSS and JavaScript to make a website a long gone you can build a website literally in minutes without knowing anything about coding or servers or anything like that I've been building websites multiple times a year since 2010 so I followed the space for a long time and it's literally never been easier but it's now gotten to the point where there are an overwhelming number of choices when it comes to making a website at different price points with different features and so in this video we're going to start by breaking down the three different paths that you could take if you want to build a website and then based on which of those different paths you want to choose I'm going to share some recommendations as to how you can build a website for different price points without having to know how to code what is the point of a website in the first place a website is essentially a home on the internet it is a place where anyone in the world can type in a URL in their little address bar and then they can go to your website and so it's a way of you being able to Showcase basically whatever the hell you want without a social media platform like LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook or whatever and depending on who you are and what your needs are then the different stuff that you have on this website is going to vary so for example if you're a professional then you might want to have a personal website because if for example someone's looking to hire you yes they're going to look at your LinkedIn profile but they're probably going to Google you and normally the first result is going to be your own personal website and so you can kind of use that as a professional CV or a personal CV of sorts if you're working in like a creative field or something you can have your portfolio on the website and even if you're not then at least you can showcase what you want employers and people who might hire you in the future to be seeing on your website secondly if you're a Creator then a website is a great place where you can publish written content so these are the bloggers and the writers and even like the graphic designers and illustrators and stuff if you're going to be publishing content regularly whatever that content is then yes of course you can put it on social media platforms but you also might as well put it on your website and thirdly if you're an entrepreneur or you're a business and you want to sell stuff then a website is a fantastic way of selling things loads of Commerce is done on the internet these days and you need a website to be able to sell stuff and a website that we're talking about in this video is distinct from a web app so a web app would be something like Twitter it is an application on the web that people can access on the web and can interact with and it's basically like an app but in the form of a website that's not what we're talking about here it's really really hard to build a web app I.E an app in the form of a website without knowing how to code you kind of need to know how to code and that is like a whole other board game but in this video I want to focus on the traditional website basically a place where you can either showcase your stuff or you can write content or you can sell things and those are the three different paths that you can go down and depending on which of these three things is your primary concern I've got a few different personal recommendations as to what website platform you should go for and how you might want to go about it I'll put timestamps to everything down below so if you don't want to watch the whole video then you don't have to because it's probably going to be quite long but you can decide which of these paths you want to go down so path number one is where you are trying your best to publish some kind of content regularly probably going to be written content but it doesn't necessarily have to be written content path number two is where you don't really care about publishing content regularly on the website you would rather have your website as a bit of a showcase so for example if you're a professional it might be your personal or professional CV if you're a business and you want to sell Services rather than products then this would be your showcase where Maybe you show your portfolio or the kind of work you've done and it lets people who want to do business with you see what you're all about by going on your website and then path number three is where you want to actually sell stuff on your website so that might be for businesses or even creators or entrepreneurs if you want to sell stuff whether it's digital or physical then you want to go down path number three and you need a website that's got e-commerce functionality built into it path number one I primarily want a website so that I can publish content now here there is a very good free option and that is sub stack now substack technically is not a website platform it is in fact a newsletter platform and on the sub stack you can sign up completely for free and then you can write a weekly or bi-weekly or however often you want newsletter which then gets emailed to people who subscribe to your newsletter but then it also lives on the website now if you don't want to pay anything at all then you can get the sub stack domain name so it might be I don't know Ali abdall.substack.com but if you want you can buy your own domain and so whatever platform I use to design my website or even sub stack I can connect up my domain name to that so I don't need to have aliba.substite.com I can just have alibdahl.com now sub stack is really good if all you care about is publishing content it is a very easy way to get started you don't need to worry about design or customization or any of that faff and there are so many people I know who have started creating content on the internet through publishing on sub stack initially completely for free and then later on You Can level up yourself to a fancier more customizable website if that's what you want so sub stack is level one and then level two within the content creator publishing content path is a platform called ghost now I've been using ghost since 2015 so for the last eight years as of the recording of this video my website has been hosted on ghost and ghost starts at nine dollars a month and so it's a fantastic platform if you kind of want to do the publishing content thing regularly but you want a proper website rather than quote just a sub stack account on that basic plan at the moment you can get some of their basic templates the basic templates are very good honestly for the first like four years of me having my own website I was just using the completely free default box standard theme that ghost supplies and I would constantly get emails from people being like Oh my God how did you design your website it's so pretty the other nice thing about ghost is that it's got newsletters and memberships built into it so let's say you you start publishing content regularly you've got your proper website that you've connected your domain name to and now you want to start launching a paid membership option you can do that if you want or if you want to start sending newsletters you can do that if you want it's the same sort of functionality that subtype provides but it just gives you a proper looking website rather than just a substant newsletter and then if you want to upgrade from Ghost you can upgrade to level 3 which is WordPress and actually we have just migrated from Ghost to Wordpress as of like this week so what is WordPress well basically WordPress is free open source software that powers around 40 of the websites on the entire internet it is by far and away the market leader in terms of what people build their websites on and WordPress started off as a blogging platform kind of like what ghost is but over time it just got more and more and more features some say it became very bloated and became less about being a professional blogger and more about just a platform that you can build literally any website on now the reason why I've not been using Wordpress for my own personal website since 2015 is because I didn't need it WordPress has tons of features it's a little bit bloated at times anytime I fiddled with WordPress for my own personal site I would feel overwhelmed and then I wouldn't end up writing any and so for the first eight years of my internet career my site wasn't ghost because ghost was nice and simple but now that our site is getting like a million hits a month or something like that we kind of needed to upgrade to something a little bit more full featured because there's all sorts of other stuff we want to start including in the website which is why we've switched over from Ghost to Wordpress it's not necessarily something I'd recommend for a lot of people I think if you're just a blogger and you just want to write stuff on the internet and you want a pretty looking website to go with it ghost is still a really solid option but if you're looking for something a little bit more full-featured and more customizable there's like literally tens of thousands of plugins for WordPress as well so almost any functionality you want you can add to Wordpress broadly without having to know how to code and there's also marketplaces of like literally thousands of different themes so you can get your website to look however you want now WordPress is actually free but if you want to actually use WordPress to host your website which is kind of level three in this particular content path you need to find a hosting provider and there's loads of these on the market but the one that we personally use is called a WP engine and the reason we use WP engine is basically for the reliability the security the performance yes it's a little bit more expensive than some of the really really cheap options but I've been using WP engine to host the WordPress site for another one of my businesses since like 2017 and so I had a lot of experience using that and never had any issues with it at all and so when it came to switching over from Ghost to Wordpress they were the first people we went to and very excitingly they also agreed to sponsor this video they've got some stats on the website that show that people who migrate from other hosting providers to WP engine experience a 40 increase in their page load times they've got automatic updates for WordPress and for PHP so you don't have to deal with any of the server management stuff yourself and the support team behind it is absolutely fantastic anytime I've needed support for instance like 2017 through right now I just messaged them on the live chat and they either get someone on the phone or they just reply almost immediately and so if you're in this level 3 zone for being a Creator or potentially you're a business and you want a fully fledged website that is way more customizable than a lot of the other options that you've got and you want to go with WordPress which is free and open source and has a ridiculously big team behind it and that powers like 40 of the internet and if you want your WordPress installation and server hosted by the best option out there in WP engine at least in my personal view then you can head over to wpng.com forward slash LA or you can hit the link in the video description anyway thank you WP engine for sponsoring this video and let's now move on to path number two I primarily want a website so that I can showcase myself or my services now I'm distinguishing path number two the Showcase from path number one the content piece because primarily the objective of path number two is literally just to Showcase stuff where maybe you occasionally update your website the intention of path number two is not that you want to write blog posts once or twice a week and so there are three options that I would recommend again on different levels so level one is a fantastic platform called card and card is a great way of building one page websites I think Cod I've been building sites on card also since about 2017-ish and the great thing about card is that it's free to get started and if you want to upgrade to the pro version it's only 19 for the whole year which makes card like probably the single best paid hosting option generally yes you can get free website hosting but it generally sucks so you do generally have to pay at least something for website hosting and I think hard is the best platform out there if all you really care about is having a one-page website now what might a one-page website be let's say you're a freelancer and you just want to advertise your services all let's say you're a professional and you literally just want a one-page website where you can just write a few details so that if someone Googles you they stumble on your website maybe you could just write a little bit of a bio or include a link to your CV or include a link to your social profiles alternatively let's say you're a business and you do lawn care services and you literally just want a website a single page that says what kind of services you provide and a number to ring you or some kind of contact form to put on the website where people can get in touch all of those simple use cases are absolutely fantastic for COD and it's pretty easy to use and pretty easy to update as and when you need to and it's the cheapest option out there so that was level one now level two in this showcase mode is something called super and super is basically a website buildery type platform that takes in a notion page and converts it into a website again this is not amazing if you're planning to publish loads and loads of content very regularly for that I'd recommend path number one but if you just want to showcase your services you want a Business website maybe you want a careers page a lot of people use it for that then you can literally just create a notion page for free on notion you're probably familiar with notion if you're not it's basically like a note-taking app with a bunch of other fancy features but then you basically write down you want on this page it's very easy and then you hook it up to Super super.so and it turns it into a website for you now super also does have a free option if you want to be limited by the number of pages that you can create and if you want the subdomain something.super.so but if you want something a little bit more professional looking then you've got to upgrade to the professional package which I think starts at 12 a month so this is a more expensive option than card it's even a more expensive option than ghost the starter plan but I know a bunch of people who build websites on super and they generally find it fairly accessible without needing to know how to code now the level three option here is to use something like Squarespace or Wix you have almost certainly seen YouTubers talk about Squarespace and you've probably seen ads for Wix these are I guess the two most famous platforms when it comes to kind of all-in-one website builder now I've used both Squarespace and Wix for a bunch of different websites over the years I haven't used them in the last year though so maybe things have updated in the last 12 months but whenever I use them to make websites it's nice and easy but there's something about the experience of making a website on Squarespace or Wix that I have not really been a fan of compared to something like ghost or something like card or something like super but if you know absolutely nothing about code and you're willing to pay a little bit more for a very easy Plug and Play solution you can connect your own domain name they give you a domain name for free for a year both Wix and software space have basically the same features you could even sell stuff on them if you want to but if you're looking to have a website where you're publishing lots and lots of content regularly this isn't the option that I would recommend which is why Squarespace and Wix are not in path number one but let's say you want to have a Business website and you don't want to deal with all the faff of kind of these other website Builders and you want the option of customizing the navigation or the colors or the fonts and adding in more pages further down the line then both Squarespace and Wix are pretty good part number three I primarily want a website so that I can sell my stuff now here it really depends on do you want to sell physical product or do you want to sell digital products if you want to sell physical products then the best option these days is Shopify Shopify is generally considered the gold standard when it comes to creating an e-commerce store you've got all sorts of small Brands like we were selling our stationery on Shopify because it's great for physical products it links up with like distribution and warehouses and all that kind of stuff kind of easy to customize although it's easier to customize if you know a little of code but they've got tons and tons of themes that you can choose from and actually Shopify Powers even huge Brands like gymshark that does like a billion dollars in sales every year so basically from starting out to scaling up into billion dollar business Shopify is the way to go for a lot of director consumer physical product Brands but if you want to sell digital products there are lots of other options that are more like full featured than Shopify for the digital stuff there are two that I'd recommend personally so a sort of beginner basic option is podia that I was using from 2017 through to 2022. podia is great it's reasonably priced I think it's like 39 a month so if you're expecting to be selling more than 39 a month worth of digital products like online courses or PDFs or downloads or anything like that then podia is really nice it lets you make a website that website can look really pretty even if you don't know how to code and actually we did like 2.5 million dollars worth of sales for our YouTuber academy by just hosting it on podia and not having to think too hard about it but there's a more advanced version of podia and that is kajabi which is the one that we now have migrated everything over to it takes a little bit more work of like tinkering with it a little bit to get it looking really nice I think podium looks really nice out of the box but kajabi is more customizable and you can make funnels and you can have an email list and you can do all this other fancy stuff it does start at around 150 a month so if you expect to be doing way more than 150 a month in sales then a platform like kajabi would be what I would recommend but really the main thing when it comes to any of these nine different things that we've talked about is actually figuring out what you personally want a website for and then actually just trying out a few of these different platforms you might find you really like Squarespace you might find oh my God I freaking love ghost you might find a sub stack solves all your problems but there isn't really one easy answer for what's the best website platform it's like they all have their pros and cons they all have different user interfaces and user experiences and it just kind of depends what works for you so hopefully this video gave you a little bit more of an insight into what options you might want to go for when it comes to starting a website if you wanted to go completely down the free route and you're interested in finding out more about the sub stack thing I've got a video here which is all about a step-by-step guide to how to start an email newsletter so check that out if you want more of a step-by-step guide on how to get started with substack so thank you so much for watching have a great day and I'll see you hopefully in the next video bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 508,827

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, how to make a website, best platforms for hosting, best platforms for websites, how to create a website, website with no coding, no coding, how to make a website for free, create a website, how to build a website, build a website, how to create a website for free, website, website tutorial, make a website, how to design a website, creating a website, website builder, create website, website design, how to make website, how to make a website 2021

Id: IgT24YYn4DU

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 16 2023