Very Generic Question yet so Complexly Answered
Most probably you’ve been lead here with a bit of interest, if not an extreme desire to put up your very own and grandiose website, and like most other, myself included, have been intimidated by not knowing the whole process. Fewer rants, more on the topic.
The First Step to Create a Website — Decide How To Create Your Website
Yep. The first thing is to figure out how to build your excellent website. Building the site can be one of three:
- Hire a programmer to make the site for you.
- Find an easy point-and-click website builder software.
- Code the site yourself.
I prefer the latter. Since, being able to code my websites from scratch, gives me the fullest control over it. Specifically, I meant being able to put up videos, customized styles, and my favorite JavaScript scripts — to make slides and other fancy animations with menus and stuff. In shorter terms, coding a website from scratch is the best but hardest way possible.
Hire a Clever Programmer to Code your site
Just my opinion, but wits on programming, it’s better than any skill or experience. Dealing with codes is like making something out of lego pieces, or even sand, then build an empire. It’s a matter of a programmer’s approach to coding your website, so chances are, you will get better quality, easier to maintain, and user-friendly internet sites.
However the otherwise also applies. Going overboard with a website’s features (keep in mind) compromises the performance of the said website. More features equal larger files, more complicated codes, lots of memory, equals slower sites.
Most that was stated also applies to the last option: coding from scratch. For starters, if you just want a website, no fancy stuff, I’ll say go to w3schools, a pretty much standard place to learn HTML for beginners. Within days to a week, you’re ready to go.
If you wanted more complex CSS and JavaScript, or even, CGI, Perl, PHP, and so on, it’ll take maybe months. But don’t ask me, I bored myself to this for years.
But then again, there’s always an easy mode to everything. Get a WYSIWYG (mouthful short for “what you see is what you get” software), shorter: point-and-click software to create your website. You only just point a rectangle, drag-and-drop, draw a little here and there somewhere, type in contents, no codes what not, in thirty minutes you have a website!
Step Two to Create a Website — Domain Names and Web Host
The three essentials to building a website are;
- Making the website.
- Registering a domain name.
- Uploading to a web host.
A domain name is www.yoursite.com, www.domain.com, which isn’t free. Today’s prices are bound to $10 give or take for dot com websites.
If you don’t want to pay, you may find subdomains a safe haven. Subdomains are like www.sub.domain.com, www.yoursite.blogspot.com.
Another one which is very popular nowadays is called, “URL Forwarding.” These are sites that allow you to use their subdomain to redirect a user to your real website, not much difference to subdomains, except names go like these: www.yoursite.co.nr, which is cooler. www.mysite.cu.cc looks more professional, than something like www.mysite.someothersite.com. And best of all, URL forwarding is free!
Get a web host. Hosting is expensive, especially if you upload large files, such as videos and graphics to your site. Prices play neatly about $30 more or less. Again, the free option. Find a free web host.
A good free web host will have features including, FTP (file transfer protocol) to upload your files, scripting supports (so you can use fresh and fancy scripts for your website), PHP support (few will offer this), large space, and a lot of bandwidths.
Just a quick note, I always believed that people get what they pay for. Sometimes these free hosts will place advertisements on your website, at times not, but the hosting quality and features may fall apart somewhere.
To end this, I do suggest you try it out first using a no-cost self-made-website, in a free subdomain, and a free host. Because you are reading this far on the article kind of tells me you’re a newbie or not even a programmer. And it’s the best option first to get used to being a webmaster before you pay for these kinds of stuff. Always risky.
Hope it helps. Best of Luck!