HTML is the website coding language.
If that sentence made your eyes glaze over, then all you need to know is - Choose a website template site and you'll never have to understand any of it, it will be done for you.
Until 4 and a half years ago, my website was coded in Html by my husband. No-one knew, It looked professional, and had all the right features, because if you know how to do the coding, you can use html as a language to make your website do whatever you want. The pictures and graphics can be situated anywhere, and the background programming could make it perfectly searchable and findable on search engines.
My 2012 website home page, all coded in Html.
HOWEVER,
even if you, or someone you know can programme in this language, I no longer recommend that you do any of your coding yourself apart from the odd bit of "adding in widgets or apps"
My reasons for saying that is
1) Everything now needs to be responsive, and able to be viewed on Mobiles and Tablets as well as on a desktop computer. If your website is no longer responsive, then you will be penalised by the search engines, and won't get found. As the vast majority of my searches are on phone or table (69% last month) you’ll never sell anything if you site isn’t responsive. Don’t forget that you website is your shop front.
2) The Web browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, et al) are updating their sites more often than ever before, and Websites need to be accessible and readable on all of these browsers.
3) The price of getting a top quality website template has fallen dramatically, meaning that it is now truly in the Low cost marketing bracket. My Squarespace website price with a webshop is £288 including VAT a year. So it falls well within the low cost category
other website companies you could use are
SEO or search engine optimisation is the way that your website is indexed and filed so that it can be found on the internet.
Imagine a Book Library... A large building with many book shelves and thousands and thousands of books. We can find books on the topics we want, because of a system called the Dewey decimal classification. Each book is categorised when it comes into the building , divided into subject, and given a code, then it's placed on the shelves in that order. Imagine if a box of books comes into the Library building and gets put away on the shelves randomly without being classified... - How would you find them? The answer is, you couldn't.... Unless you had limitless time and lots of resources.
Its the same for the internet. Your new website or updates to your website need to be filed to be able to be found.
In this case, there are automatic pieces of programming (called Spiders or bots) running round doing the filing, rather than Librarians BUT if you don't give them the information to enable them to do the classifying of your website, IT WON'T BE FOUND.
To enable your listing to be found on a search engine, you need to get the right Title and content. Both for your readers who will be looking at the page information, and the words that they will be putting into their search engines
Here's what you see on a listing site if your website gets found.
The first part which is in Bold and Purple font is title and content, the next part which is in green font is the actual URL (address)of the webpage and the next part in grey is the content .
What is shown on here is defined by an Algorithm. It will be looking at the content of your website to be able to fill in those listing parts. It will only show the words you use.
To be able to be found by the words that are likely to be typed into a search engine, you need to ensure those words are in phrases that your customer will want to read, on your website.
If you try and trick the search engines by putting in lots of words that you'd "like" to be found under, then your customers will get a clunky sentence that doesn't work for them.
If all your customers are going to be typing "budget wedding flowers" then if you have nothing mentioning Budget wedding flowers in your descriptions (even if it's to say we don't do budget wedding flowers) then you won't get found by the search engines.