Build a website from scratch: the complete guide

You don't need a design, a logo, a domain, or a plan. You need to be able to answer three questions about your business, and it's worth thinking about them for ten minutes before you type anything, because they're what the whole site gets built around.

Who is this for? Not "everyone" — the actual person who pays you. "Couples planning a wedding in regional Victoria" is useful. "Customers" is not.

What do they get? The outcome, not the activity. "A venue booked without a dozen site visits" beats "wedding venue hire".

Why you and not the alternative? The honest answer, even if it's small. "The only barn venue in the region with on-site accommodation" is worth more than any amount of adjectives.

If you have a logo file and a few real photos of your work, have them handy — but genuinely don't wait for them. You can add both later in the editor, and a site with generated imagery live today beats a perfect one that never ships.

Open the builder and type into the prompt box. Plain sentences, no keywords, no formatting. The three answers you just wrote are a good first message on their own.

A weak first prompt: "a bakery website". Webese will build you something, but it has to guess at everything that matters.

A strong first prompt: "A sourdough bakery in Ballarat that opens at 5am for tradies and sells out by 10. We do wholesale to four local cafés as well as walk-ins. Nobody else in town bakes overnight." That's specific enough to produce a site that couldn't be swapped onto a competitor.

You do not need to describe the design. Webese picks a palette, type system and layout that suit the business you've described, and you can change all of it afterwards.

Webese asks up to three short questions before or during the build. It only asks about things it genuinely cannot work out and refuses to invent — most often the email address enquiries should reach, the tone you want, and who's actually behind the business.

Answer the About question properly if you can. On a small business site, the section about the people doing the work is one of the most-read things on the page, and it's the one part Webese will not make up. A site with a real two-sentence story reads completely differently from one without.

If a question doesn't apply, say so and it moves on.

In a minute or two you'll have a complete site: a hero, an About section, your offer, proof, and a clear next action — with search metadata, social previews and structured data already written. Nothing is published, and nothing is charged.

Resist the urge to start clicking immediately. Read it as a stranger would, top to bottom, and ask one question: does the first screen say what I do, for whom, and what to do next? Everything else is detail.

Then check it on a phone. Use the Mobile button in the bar above the site. Most of your visitors will arrive this way, and it's the view most people forget to look at until after launch.

Anything structural — the order of sections, what the page leads with, the tone, an entire section that's missing — is faster to ask for in the chat than to fix by hand.

Be directive and concrete. "Lead with the overnight baking, not the café list." "Cut the testimonials section." "Make the whole thing warmer and less corporate." "Add a section about wholesale enquiries."

Revisions keep what you've already changed by hand, including your fonts, so you're not choosing between chat and the editor — do the big moves in chat first, then the fine work by hand.

Switch to Editor with the toggle at the top left. Now everything on the page is clickable.

Click any text to rewrite it in place. A small toolbar gives you a colour picker for text that's hard to read, buttons to nudge the size up or down, a way to add an image underneath, and a delete for the whole block.

Click any image — including your logo and the big photo behind the hero — to upload your own or generate a new one, resize it, choose whether it fits inside its slot or fills it, and align it.

Hover any repeated card — a product, a team member, a service — for a Duplicate button, which adds another in the same design with no rewriting.

Change the fonts across the whole site from Fonts in the ⋯ menu. Hovering a pairing previews it on your real page, so you can judge it in place rather than from a sample.

Maps and video headers are clickable too: a map opens a box for a new location, a video header lets you upload your own clip.

Use the Desktop / Tablet / Mobile switcher above the canvas. These aren't illustrations — the site genuinely re-lays itself out at each width, exactly as the device would render it, so what you see is what your visitor gets.

Look for the things that only break at narrow widths: a heading that's now too big for its space, an image that's lost its crop, a section whose order stopped making sense when it stacked into one column.

You can fix all of it in the editor while still in the phone view, which is much faster than switching back and forth and guessing.

Share a preview link is in the ⋯ menu. It produces a link anyone can open — no account, no payment, no publishing. Send it to someone who knows your business but hasn't seen the site.

Ask them one question: what do we do, and who for? If they can't answer from the first screen, the problem is the copy, not the design.

This is free and unlimited. Use it before you commit to anything.

Press Publish. Your site goes live at its own webese.ai address, and the sitemap, robots.txt, llms.txt, search metadata and social preview images are all generated and kept in sync for you. Publishing is the point where a paid plan is needed — everything up to here isn't.

Before you do, run Fix links & SEO from the ⋯ menu. It refreshes the search metadata and checks every link on the page in one pass, which is the single highest-value thing you can do in the minute before launching.

After publishing, the Publish button becomes Save. Keep editing whenever you like; changes go live at the same address immediately.

If you own a domain already, connect it from the dashboard for a one-time fee — not a subscription. Webese works out who your registrar is and gives you the exact record to add, with steps written for that specific registrar rather than generic DNS advice.

If your domain currently has email running on it, say so when you're asked. The record for a bare domain and the record for a domain with live mail are different, and using the wrong one is the classic way people take down their own email during a launch.

Verification and a real SSL certificate happen automatically once the record is visible. That's usually minutes, occasionally a few hours.

A site that never changes stops earning attention. The two highest-value things you can do after launch are adding real pages and keeping your offer current.

Add blog posts and extra pages from the dashboard: give a topic and Webese writes it in your site's own voice and design, as a genuinely separate, independently indexable page. Your nav gains a Blog menu with a live dropdown and your sitemap updates itself.

If you sell, add your store: connect your own Stripe account or take bank transfers, add products, and keep 100% of what you charge — Webese takes 0% and never holds your money. Note that buy buttons only work on a published site.

Come back and ask for revisions whenever the business changes. It's the same chat; your fonts and hand edits survive.