Building my own website – Here is an essential step by step guide to creating your own website.
If you are an absolute beginner this is where you should start. if you already have your own domain name and web hosting you can fast forward to part 3.
1. Get Your Domain Name.
The very first thing i did when i started building my own website was to get my domain name. A basic domain name will cost around $ 10 a year. Remember that this is only a domain name and not an actual website.
Because of the amount of web site names out there, you may often find that the one that you want is already taken. Sometimes it may take a little bit of searching to find a suitable domain name and the sites that we get our domain names from help us by offering many alternatives to the searches that we type in.
The companies that register domain names are called registars and the largest and easiest registrars are called "Go Daddy" if you are in the US and "Namecheap" if you live in the UK.
Geographically it does not matter where your register is despite i think its nice to use a company that's based in the same country you live in. These are just two of the many you can use but if you do an online search or ask around in forums, you are sure to find a lot more.
2. Choose A Web Host
Once you have registered your domain name you need to choose a web host, also known as a hosting company. A web host is basically a company that connects your website to the World Wide Web.
There are many web hosts and finding one is as easy as doing an online search or many domain registers will offer web hosting when you buy a domain from them. often this is an easy option to have your domain name and web hosting all in one place.
when building my own website i started using Host gator, (a web hosting company) and i can recommend them for ease of use and good service.
expect to pay around $ 10 – $ 15 per month for web hosting and creating an account takes no more than a minute or two.
Once your account is set up your web host will send you an important email. Please keep this email in a safe place.ie save to a folder on your desktop or write it down somewhere it wont get lost. It is important to keep this email as this is what we are going to use later to publish your website.
Once you have your domain name and your web hosting set up you are ready to create your website.
3. Web Editor
The next step in building my own website was to download and install a web editor. A web editor is a program we use to create our website to then upload it to our hosting company.
Now there are a lot web editors around and you can pay a lot of money for one, but there are perfectly good ones we can download for free.
Just type in "free web editor" into your browser and find one that looks good.
4. Creating A Website
Now you can use your web editor to import and create text, images and videos to build your website. In our web editor we can also upload or "publish" our website to the world-wide web.
Now we can have a go at putting in text, dragging and dropping images and rearranging things to make them look good.
I really hope you can see as did i started building my own website, just how powerful this can be.
Now this is just a brief overview of the basics to get started and i appreciate that there are other steps and tips to also consider that i used when i started building my own website. Hopefully this will help you to take that first step.
To read my free eBook that goes into much more depth about how i started building my own website click on the link below.
