Create Your Own Website To Your Taste: A-Z Guide
This tutorial shows you how to make or create a website. It is intended for the beginner and layperson, taking you step by step through the whole process from the very beginning. It makes very few assumptions about what you know (other than the fact that you know how to surf the Internet, since you're already reading this article on the Internet). As some steps are more involved, this guide also links to selected relevant articles on gastdblog that you will need to click through to read for more information.
Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Own Website
Get Domain Name First
The first thing you need to do before anything else is to get yourself a domain name. This is the name you want to give to your website. For example, the domain name of the website you're reading is "gastd.blogspot.com". To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. For you 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 it.
- How to get a good domain name can be found in the article Tips on Choosing a Good Domain Name.
- After you read that, you will need to know the steps to registering a domain name and the things you need to look out for when registering. You can find a detailed guide in the article Domain Name.
- Beware of unscrupulous people/webmaster online, just that you don't commit the same mistakes that some newcomers make when buying a domain name.
Choose a Web Host to Sign Up for a Reasonable 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 comparable to renting office or shop premises for your business.
- There are many issues involved in finding a good web host.
- When you have an idea of what to look for, you can search for one from the Blogger Web Hosting page. You can also find out which web host I'm currently using from the Which Web Host Do You Recommend? page.
After you sign up for a web hosting account, you will need to point your domain to that account on your web host. Information on how to do this can be found in the guide How to Point a Domain Name to Your Website (Or What to Do After Buying Your Domain Name).
Design your Own 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.
There are many commercial and free web editors around. For those who don't mind spending money on a commercial program, There are many other web design software around.Although there are many considerations in web design, as a beginner, your first step is to actually get something out onto the web. The fine-tuning can come after you've figured out how to publish a basic web page. One way is to use a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") web editor to do it. Such editors allow you to design your site visually, without having to muck around with the technical details. They work just like a normal wordprocessor.
You can also SEARCH for Free HTML Editors and WYSIWYG Web Editors page online.
An integral part of web design is search engine readiness. Search engine promotion does not start after the web site is made. It starts at the web design stage.
How to improve Search Engine Ranking on Google is also important for the simple reason that Google is the most popular search engine around, at least at the time this page was written.There are many other issues regarding the design of web pages. The above will get you started.
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 don't actually need technical knowledge of HTML and CSS to validate the page, since you can use one of the numerous free web page validators around to do the hard work. On the other hand, if the validator tells you that your page has errors, it may sometimes be hard to figure out what's wrong (and whether the error is actually a serious one) if you don't have the requisite knowledge. Having said that, some validators actually give concrete suggestions on how to fix your code, and one of them, called "HTML Tidy", is even supposed to be able to fix errors for you.
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.
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.
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.
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