Questions about building a website, answered

To make a website from scratch, plan your pages on paper, write the content and structure in HTML, style it with CSS, add a little JavaScript only if you need interaction, then publish the files to a free static host such as GitHub Pages, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages and point a domain at it. A simple personal or business site takes a beginner a few days to a few weeks.

Choose WordPress if non-technical people will publish content, you want thousands of ready plugins and themes, and you can manage updates and security. Choose Next.js if a developer builds and maintains the site, you want full control over design and performance, and the site is custom or part of a product. Many teams combine them: WordPress for content, Next.js for the front end.

React is good for websites with interactive features, many reusable parts or app-like behavior, and React's own documentation recommends using it through a framework such as Next.js so pages are rendered on the server and stay fast and search-friendly. For a simple brochure site with a few static pages, React adds complexity you may not need; plain HTML, a static site generator or a website builder can be simpler.

You can turn a Figma design into a website in four ways: publish directly with Figma Sites (Figma's own web publishing, launched in 2025), rebuild it in a visual builder such as Framer or Webflow, hand it to a developer using Figma's Dev Mode, or code it yourself in HTML and CSS or a framework. The right route depends on how custom the design is and who will maintain the site.

To make a website wireframe, decide what each page must achieve, list the content it needs, then sketch the page as simple gray boxes and labels showing where the headline, images, text and buttons go, in order of importance. Do it on paper or in a tool like Figma, plan the mobile version too, and show it to a few people before any colors, fonts or images are chosen.

A static website serves pages that are built ahead of time and identical for every visitor, so it is fast, cheap to host and hard to hack. A dynamic website builds pages on the server when they are requested, so it can show personalized or constantly changing content such as accounts, carts and dashboards. Most marketing sites, portfolios and blogs can be static; stores and apps need dynamic parts.

A static site has no server to receive form data, so you hand the submission to something that does. The three common options are your host's built-in forms (Netlify Forms works by adding one attribute), a form backend service such as Formspree that emails you each submission, or a small serverless function you write. All three work with plain HTML, and the first two need no code beyond the form itself.

Add a blog on your own domain, ideally at yoursite.com/blog. If your site runs on a builder such as Wix, Squarespace, Webflow or WordPress, use its built-in blog. If it is custom code, use Markdown files for an occasional blog or a headless CMS if non-developers will write. Avoid putting the blog on a separate platform's domain, because the traffic and links it earns then help that platform, not your site.