Thursday, March 12, 2009

How to Start a Website


How do you start your own website? This is a common question asked among beginners that need computer help. After you buy or upgrade your computer, and master using the internet, the next logical step is to create your own home within this virtual world. The nice thing is that technology has progressed to the point where there are nearly an unlimited amount of options if you do want to start up a blog or web page.

You have two ways to go about this adventure - learn from scratch and build your website alone, or pay someone with the experience and knowledge to do it for you. If you need business web design, the latter option is for you. You can talk to a new jersey wordpress designer specialist and get a site up and running in no time. If you are more of a hands on person, get ready to dig in to the world wide web.

I'll highlight some of the more common options, and give a few details of how to start a website that doesn't involve using a free online service.

1) Blogs, blogs, blogs... If you're just looking for a place to vent, write about friends and family, keep an online journal, or discuss your passion, the easiest option is setting up a blog. You may notice that this website is hosted on blogspot.com - you can build a blog here from start to finish in a few minutes! And it's 100% free, which is always attractive to the beginner who just wants to try something new out. This is not the only site where you can do this, though - you'll want to check out several free blogs and determine which you like best for starting a website. Some of the more popular options are Wordpress.com, Webs.com, HubPages.com, Squidoo.com... if you want to find more just Google something along the lines of 'create free website' or 'create free blog'. You will undoubtedly find more options than you could possibly want.

2) Buy a Domain - This is optional if you start a free online blog from one of the aforementioned websites, but usually you have the option to redirect your subdomain to a custom domain name if you do choose to buy one. You'll notice that most blogspot blogs use a subdomain of blogspot.com... i.e. yourwebsitename.blogspot.com. If you simply want this to be yourwebsite.com you need to buy that particular domain. This is actually very cheap - the most popular site to register domains is GoDaddy.com, and it only costs about $10/year. While this is not necessary for the free blogs, it is easier to remember and a little bit cleaner. You will need a domain if you choose to purchase a web hosting plan. Which brings us to our next topic....

3) Web Hosting - A lot of computer beginners do not understand the details of web hosting. They know it's necessary to build a website, but don't dive into to the deep end to figure out more. I'll likely post a more detailed entry about this in the future, but I'll keep things simple and clear here. There are plenty of companies that offer web hosting plans for your website needs. One of the more popular options is HostGator.com. They usually offer several options, such as shared hosting or reseller hosting. If you plan to start a single website you only need a shared plan. This means your website will reside on a shared server that belongs to the hosting company, along with many other websites. A shared plan is actually pretty cheap, anywhere from $5-10/month. You must read the details to determine whether the plan fits your needs. You will see several options, such as storage space, bandwidth, e-mail accounts, ftp capability, operating system, database options, shopping cart etc., etc. If you are new to the game, this can defintitely make your head spin.

I'll keep things basic here - storage is self explanatory, that is basically your hard drive space on your portion of the shared server. Bandwidth is usually a monthly cap of how many MB or GB can be downloaded from your server in a month. So for example, if you have a one-page website that is 1MB, and your bandwidth is 1GB, in any particular month you can serve 1000 page loads (1000 visits x 1MB = 1000MB = 1GB). If person #1001 tries to load your website, they will likely get a message in their browser that says 'bandwidth exceeded'. If your website is mainly text, the chances of you exceeding your bandwidth are very low - high bandwidth is really only necessary if you are hosting a lot of images or videos.

4) Website Design - once you have your website registered, whether its through a free service or web hosting plan, the next step is to design it. This can be costly if you choose to outsource this, but if you are a beginner you will clearly be looking to learn a little and do this yourself. Again, if you are using a free blog, chances are there are a lot of templates you can download to really hide the details of this whole process. If you want to learn about design, I suggest you use a free template that you like and then dig in with some HTML or CSS code to get a basic understanding of what is going on behind the scenes. Web design is actually very fun when you get into it, because it brings together science and art in a very practical way. If you have any photoshop skills, it's definitely worth looking into web design because you can probably create a sweet site by your lonesome. Don't be afraid to go on forums and ask people for help, too. The best resource is a helpful person.

I've been through a few basics here, and I will surely write more detailed posts about web hosting and web design in the future. These are very hot topics when it comes to people who want to proudly display their website. In the meantime, look into some free blog or web services and play around. The investment is all time and no money, so you've really got nothing to lose.

6 comments:

  1. That's a very broad thing to do. When I started hooking up in making websites, studying the basic steps such as html and css was the very first thing I did. The whole process was really very fun!

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  2. Hey Buddy, you described all the step to make a website run in a very good manner. If one follows these steps can make a good website. Thanks for sharing the nice post.
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  3. I am always searching online for articles that can help me. Looking forward to another great blog. Good luck to the author! all the best.
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  4. Steps you shown in the post are worth reading as using these one can run their own website.
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  5. This is awesome to get a website but much more important is to know how to get a website on Google, as it will make you help run your business.

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