Whether you are looking to set up a small personal website simply to showcase your hobbies and interests or a complex database driven site to advertise your business, the prospect of constructing your own website can be quite daunting. This article intends to guide you through the basics including registering a domain name, choosing a good web host, creating the html pages and publishing your site onto the internet.
Step 1 - Choose and register a domain name
Good domain names are becoming more and more difficult to find, all to often you have a great idea for a domain name only to find its already been registered by some other third party.
There are many ‘domain investors’ who register premium domain names with the intention of either parking the domain and generating an income from traffic landing on what is little more than a page full of pay per click (PPC) advertisements relating to the domain name and / or offering it for resale to the highest bidder. Depending on how committed you are to a particular domain name, it may be possible to purchase it from the current registered owner but be aware premium domain names can cost significant sums of money.
For now, let’s assume your perfect domain name is still available. Domain registration is an automated procedure where you enter the domain name you wish to register and pay the appropriate fee to the registrar. Domain setup can then take a further two to three days to complete following which time your domain is then registered to you.
Step 2 - Choose a web host
It is important to note that you don’t have to host your website with the same company you registered your domain with. Provided you register with a reputable domain name registrar who provides you with access to DNS settings, you can point your domain to any web hosts name-servers.
When choosing a web host, consider the following:
- How much space do you need to store your files, images etc?
- How many visitors to your web site do you expect?
- Are you building a dynamic website that will require access to PHP and / or MySQL databases?
- Do you need detailed statistics of visitor demographics, data transfer etc?
- What level of service do you expect from your web host?
- How much are you willing to spend on web hosting?
There are a number of options available to you when deciding how and where to host your new web site. For this exercise we will consider the most common forms of web hosting providers.
Free Web Hosting – as the name implies it is free web hosting. With free web hosting you are allocated a modest amount of web space, bandwidth and possibly a few add-ons such as a simple feedback form, site building software and an email address etc.
Free web hosting is great if you want to publish a simple web site and you don’t expect too many visitors. The main drawbacks with free web hosting are because it is provided to you free of charge, you will normally find that it will include a considerable amount of banner advertising for the host who is trying to recoup his overheads and that there is little or no guarantee of continuity of the service.
Shared Hosting – Shared web hosting is a very popular method for hosting websites. With shared hosting you are effectively ‘renting’ an amount of web-space and bandwidth from an organisation that owns and who is responsible for the web server and its associated infrastructure.
There are many web hosting providers out there competing to sell web hosting packages. In order to make their hosting packages seem more attractive than others, hosting providers are known to offer vast amounts of web space along with many gigabytes of potential data transfer, far more in fact than most people will ever need. A good host will provide you with all the necessary tools to manage your web hosting account. Included in this are file managers, ftp accounts, email accounts, DNS management, sub domains, CGI, PHP, MySQL, script libraries and much more.
Whilst the features included with the majority of shared web hosting packages may not suit everyone it is a truly inexpensive way of getting your website published on the internet.
Dedicated Hosting – Dedicated web hosting is the next level in web hosting where you do not share the server resources with anyone else and you have full control over its administration. As with shared hosting, the dedicated web hosting provider remains responsible for the server hardware and associated infrastructure management.
Whilst dedicated web hosting has significant advantages over shared hosting packages, it does require a high level of technical expertise and understanding in server management techniques.
Step 3 - Website Content
Website content is probably somewhere nearer the top of your list. After all, if you have already decided on and registered a domain name and chosen where you are going to host your site you will also have in mind some idea as to what the site is going to be about.
When it comes to publishing websites, content rules! A site with little, no or outdated content is hardly likely inspire your visitors nor will it keep them there. Similarly, websites that contain nothing more than advertisements and lists of affiliate links is most unlikely to succeed.
Website content takes many forms; it may be images, articles, tutorials, products or services you offer to name but a few. Whatever it is, concentrate on building genuine and relevant content before getting too deeply involved with page design and layouts etc.
Remember websites evolve and you should continually review the relevance and quality of existing content and try to add new content items as time goes by.
Step 4 – Create and Publish Your WebPages
There are many free and commercial WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web editors available. Whilst these are generally excellent tools for novices building basic web pages they don’t always necessarily produce ’clean‘ search engine friendly code and many web designers often prefer to delve in and work directly with the html.
Once you have designed your WebPages you will need to publish them to the web (also known as uploading) usually via an FTP account. Some of the aforementioned web editors include tools to facilitate direct uploading and synchronising of your files from within the application.
There are also numerous FTP clients available that work equally well. Before publishing or uploading, you will need to configure your FTP client with the following parameters in order for it to connect successfully to your web server:
- The name of your FTP server
- Your login name and password
- The target directory for your files
As an alternative to building static websites, there are a number of excellent Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) available that greatly simplify the process of creating and publishing dynamic database driven websites. Management and publishing of the content to these sites is generally via intuitive web browser based interfaces.