How to Start / Create Your
Own Website:
The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Own Website
1. Get Your Domain Name
The first thing you need to do before anything else
is to get yourself a domain
name. A domain name is the name you want to give to your website. For example,
the domain name of the website you're reading is "thesitewizard.com".
To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the
right to use that name. Getting a name does not get you a website or anything
like that. It's just a name. It's sort of like registering a business name in
the brick-and-mortar world; having that business name does not mean that you
also have the shop premises to go with the name.
2. Choose a Web Host and Sign Up
for an Account
A web
host is basically a company that
has many computers connected to the Internet. When you place your web pages on their computers, everyone in the
world will be able to connect to it and view them. You will need to sign up for
an account with a web host so that your website has a home. If getting a domain
name is analogous to getting a business name in the brick-and-mortar world,
getting a web
hosting account is analogous to
renting office or shop premises for your business.
After you sign up for a web hosting account, you will
need to point your domain to that account on your
web host.
3. Designing your Web Pages
Once you have settled your domain name and web
host, the next step is to design the web site itself. In this article, I will
assume that you will be doing this yourself. If you are hiring a web designer
to do it for you, you can probably skip this step, since that person will
handle it on your behalf.
4. Testing Your Website
Although I list this step separately, this should
be done throughout your web design cycle. I list it separately to give it a
little more prominence, since too few new webmasters actually perform this step
adequately.
You will need to test your web pages as you design
them in the major browsers: the latest versions of Internet Explorer (version 9
at the time of this writing), Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome.
All these browsers can be obtained free
of charge, so it should be no hardship to get them. Unfortunately, directly
testing your site in all these browsers is the only way you can really be sure
that it works the way you want it to on your visitors' machines.
5. Getting Your Site Noticed
When your site is ready, you will need to submit it
to search engines like Google and Bing. You can use the
links below to do this.
In general, if your site is already linked to by
other websites, you may not even need to submit it to these search engines.
They will probably find it themselves by following the links on those websites.
Apart from submitting your site to the search engine, you
may also want to consider promoting it in other ways, such as the usual way
people did things before the creation of the Internet: advertisements in the
newspapers, word-of-mouth, etc. There are even companies on the Internet, like
PRWeb, that can help you create press releases, which may get your site noticed
by news sites and blogs.
, you can also advertise in the various
search engines, since that was the topic of that discussion, you can also
advertise in other search engines like Bing and Yahoo!. This
has the potential of putting your advertisement near the top of the search
engine results page, and possibly even on other websites.
, you can also advertise in the various
search engines, since that was the topic of that discussion, you can also
advertise in other search engines like Bing and Yahoo!. This
has the potential of putting your advertisement near the top of the search
engine results page, and possibly even on other websites.
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