How to Create a Website: 7 Steps, DIY or With a Professional
How to create a website: what are the steps?
Here is how to create a website in seven steps. Define your goals, analyse the competition, build the site structure, design, develop, prepare the content for Google and AI search, then launch and measure. For a simple site, a website builder lets you do all of this yourself. A professional adds what is often missing afterwards. That means a structure built around your customers, markup that Google and ChatGPT read correctly, and a site your team can edit without a developer.
Our view at Pixerry: you don’t launch a website to forget about it. It is a growth tool you keep working on every week. This guide is for the person commissioning the site. It covers what to check and what to ask for at each step.
The 7 website creation steps at a glance
- Scope the project: goals, target customers, a questionnaire about your business.
- Analyse your local competitors.
- Build the information architecture and get it approved.
- Design the site, starting with the homepage.
- Develop the site and its content management area.
- Prepare the content for Google and AI search.
- Launch, measure and improve.
What to check at each step
1. Scope the project
A good provider starts with a call, then sends a questionnaire about your business and your vision. They should ask you for a measurable goal: calls, quote requests, bookings. If nobody asks, the design may end up coming before your customers.
2. Analyse your local competitors
For a local business losing ground, this is often the step that pays off most. Before the redesign of a property management agency in Lyon, we ran a SWOT audit of agencies in East Lyon and Nord-Isère. It revealed missing calls to action, information that was either too thin or too dense, and clunky navigation. Each of these gaps became an opportunity.
3. Build the site structure
Information architecture is the list of pages and how they are organised. It gets approved before any design work. Ask to see this structure and approve it in writing. Every page should answer a real search your customers make.
4. Design the website
Ask for the homepage in a few variants. That way you check the visual direction matches your brand before it is rolled out across the whole site.
5. Develop the website
This is the step most often skipped on a DIY site. Check that the text stays readable without JavaScript and that pages load fast. schema.org markup (code that describes your business to search engines) should be in place. AI crawlers should be allowed in the robots.txt file, and an llms.txt file should guide them. Compliance with GDPR in France and the nLPD in Switzerland is planned at this stage: legal notice, privacy policy, cookie consent.
6. Prepare the content for Google and AI search
SEO (search engine optimisation) targets Google. AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) target the answers generated by ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews. For Google, optimising for AI search is still SEO. It recommends unique content drawn from your hands-on experience, not a rehash of what already exists. A FAQ built from your customers’ real questions is a good place to start.
7. Launch, measure, improve
After launch, your provider should connect Search Console and an analytics tool, then collect your feedback. Next come testing, new languages and automation. A site that stops changing after launch quickly loses its ranking.
What a professional adds, step by step
| Step | Often skipped on a DIY site | What a professional brings |
|---|---|---|
| Scoping | Vague goal | Questionnaire and a measurable goal |
| Competitors | No analysis | Audit of local competitors |
| Structure | Pages added as you go | Structure approved before design |
| Design | Generic template | Homepage variants, custom animations |
| Development | Default markup and robots.txt | schema.org, llms.txt, speed, GDPR and nLPD |
| Content | Copy written without keyword research | SEO, AEO and GEO from day one |
| After launch | Static site | Search Console, tracking, improvements |
The order of steps depends on your needs
“Our approach isn’t about following steps. It starts from the client’s real needs and our expertise: we give their business what it needs at that exact moment.” Olga, founder of Pixerry Studio
An established property agency: the classic order
La Centrale Immobilière de Gestion, a property management and building management agency near Lyon, is not a new business. Its site had an outdated design and such complex technology that nothing could be changed without a developer. So analysis, structure and user experience came first. After the call and the questionnaire, we had the structure approved, then presented the homepage in several variants. Then came the build, the launch and a post-delivery questionnaire. Read the full case study here.
- 4 weeks from brief to launch, including 10 days of build
- 2 user journeys
- 4+ schema.org types, including LocalBusiness, FAQPage and Service
- 17 questions in the FAQ
The team now updates services, fees and the FAQ without a developer. The blog will come later. Local competition is strong, and regular articles prove the agency’s expertise while capturing new searches.
A salon about to open: strategy first
Stargroom, a dog grooming salon in Rolle, in the canton of Vaud, needed a site fast, with a fixed opening date. A new salon needs customers first, and the website is only one tool among others. So we started with the SEO strategy: Instagram, Facebook and the Google Business Profile while the site was being built. The style is playful and colourful, with modern animations inspired by award-winning sites. The result: 5 days of design and build, then an average position of 1.0 to 2.06 on the targeted local searches within three months.
Why we usually choose Webflow
We build both in custom code (Next.js, React) and on low-code platforms, with no default tool. Webflow comes up most often because your team can edit the site visually. Webflow offers client seats with separate roles: Marketer to create pages from components, Content editor for text, images and content, Reviewer to leave comments. Our coding skills let us go further than a template, for example with the GSAP animations on the Lyon agency’s site.
Hosting stays affordable. According to the pricing Webflow published in May 2026, the Basic plan costs $15 per month and the Premium plan $25 per month on annual billing, with 20,000 content items included. When a client asks us for WordPress, we explain why we would choose differently for their goal. Our Webflow vs WordPress comparison sets out these criteria.
Create a website yourself or hire a professional?
Google says it itself: a small local business can do a good part of its SEO work alone. It adds that the right time to bring in an expert is when you redesign or launch a site, and the earlier the better. It also warns that an unreliable provider can harm your site.
If your competitors already outrank you on Google, the real question is how much time you want to spend on it. Our Design & Development service covers all seven steps, from strategy to follow-up, and our pricing is public. Before you sign with any provider, ask them in what order they will handle these steps for your business, and why.
