This tutorial shows you how to make or create a website. It is intended for the beginner and layperson, taking you to 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 thesitewizard.com that you will need to click through to read for more information.
The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Own Website
1. Get Your Domain Name
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 "thesitewizard.com". To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. 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.
2. Choose a Web Host and Sign Up for an 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.
One factor that may influence your choice is the decision on whether to use SSL for your website. A site that uses SSL will have a web address starting with "https://" instead of "http://". In ancient times, webmasters typically only bothered to use it if they were selling goods and services and needed to collect credit card numbers, or if they had some sort of facility that required their visitors to log in with a password.
Nowadays, however, it looks like the whole of the Internet is slowly moving to a state where everything has SSL. If so, it may be a good idea for new websites to use it from the very outset. This will allow you to avoid the hassle and risk involved in moving an existing website from HTTP to HTTPS, which you may find yourself doing in the future if you don't get it done at the beginning.
In general, as far as I know, all commercial web hosts let you install SSL certificates for your site. The price varies, though, from company to company. Some give you a certificate for free. Others will install a free certificate for a one time charge. Some require you to buy a commercial certificate (which has a recurring charge). And there are those that not only require you to buy a certificate but also impose a monthly fee for using it on your website (on top of the recurring charge for that certificate).
After you sign up for a web hosting account, you will need to point your domain name to that location.
3. Designing your 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.
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 deal with the technical details. They work just like a normal word processor.
There are a number of free and commercial web editors available. If you use Windows, one of the best around is Microsoft Expression Web. This was a formerly commercial program that Microsoft now distributes for free, presumably because they no longer want to be in the web editor business. It is fully-featured and very polished (as befits software that was once sold in shops) with facilities that both new and experienced webmasters find useful.
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.
4. Testing Your Website
Although I list this step separately, it should be done throughout your web design cycle. I list it here to give it a little more prominence since too few new webmasters actually perform it adequately.
You will need to test your web pages as you design them in the major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge. All these browsers can be obtained free of charge, so it should be no hardship to get them. Unfortunately, directly testing your site is the only way you can be really sure that it works the way you want it to on your visitors' machines. In addition, if you have a smartphone, try out your site there too.
If you want to improve the chances that your website will work in future versions of all web browsers, consider validating the code for your web pages. In layman's language, this means that you should check that the underlying code of your web page, called "HTML" and "CSS", has no syntax errors. 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.
5. Getting Your Site Noticed
When your site is ready, you can submit it to the search engines. To do this, you will need to create a webmaster account at both the search engines, verify that you own the website, and submit it there. It's free on Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools
In general, if your site is already linked to from other websites, you may not even need to do the above. The search engines will probably find it themselves by following the links on those places.
Apart from submitting your site to the search engine, you may also want to consider promoting it in other ways, such as announcing it on your social media accounts or forums, as well as in the usual way people did things before the creation of the Internet: advertisements in the newspapers, word-of-mouth, etc.
Conclusion
Naturally, the above guide is not exhaustive. It is a distillation of some of the essential steps in getting started with your site. If you want more information, you should read the other articles. However, the above tutorial should be enough to help you put your ideas on the Internet.
The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Own Website
1. Get Your Domain Name
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 "thesitewizard.com". To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. 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.
2. Choose a Web Host and Sign Up for an 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.
One factor that may influence your choice is the decision on whether to use SSL for your website. A site that uses SSL will have a web address starting with "https://" instead of "http://". In ancient times, webmasters typically only bothered to use it if they were selling goods and services and needed to collect credit card numbers, or if they had some sort of facility that required their visitors to log in with a password.
Nowadays, however, it looks like the whole of the Internet is slowly moving to a state where everything has SSL. If so, it may be a good idea for new websites to use it from the very outset. This will allow you to avoid the hassle and risk involved in moving an existing website from HTTP to HTTPS, which you may find yourself doing in the future if you don't get it done at the beginning.
In general, as far as I know, all commercial web hosts let you install SSL certificates for your site. The price varies, though, from company to company. Some give you a certificate for free. Others will install a free certificate for a one time charge. Some require you to buy a commercial certificate (which has a recurring charge). And there are those that not only require you to buy a certificate but also impose a monthly fee for using it on your website (on top of the recurring charge for that certificate).
After you sign up for a web hosting account, you will need to point your domain name to that location.
3. Designing your 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.
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 deal with the technical details. They work just like a normal word processor.
There are a number of free and commercial web editors available. If you use Windows, one of the best around is Microsoft Expression Web. This was a formerly commercial program that Microsoft now distributes for free, presumably because they no longer want to be in the web editor business. It is fully-featured and very polished (as befits software that was once sold in shops) with facilities that both new and experienced webmasters find useful.
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.
4. Testing Your Website
Although I list this step separately, it should be done throughout your web design cycle. I list it here to give it a little more prominence since too few new webmasters actually perform it adequately.
You will need to test your web pages as you design them in the major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge. All these browsers can be obtained free of charge, so it should be no hardship to get them. Unfortunately, directly testing your site is the only way you can be really sure that it works the way you want it to on your visitors' machines. In addition, if you have a smartphone, try out your site there too.
If you want to improve the chances that your website will work in future versions of all web browsers, consider validating the code for your web pages. In layman's language, this means that you should check that the underlying code of your web page, called "HTML" and "CSS", has no syntax errors. 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.
5. Getting Your Site Noticed
When your site is ready, you can submit it to the search engines. To do this, you will need to create a webmaster account at both the search engines, verify that you own the website, and submit it there. It's free on Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools
In general, if your site is already linked to from other websites, you may not even need to do the above. The search engines will probably find it themselves by following the links on those places.
Apart from submitting your site to the search engine, you may also want to consider promoting it in other ways, such as announcing it on your social media accounts or forums, as well as in the usual way people did things before the creation of the Internet: advertisements in the newspapers, word-of-mouth, etc.
Conclusion
Naturally, the above guide is not exhaustive. It is a distillation of some of the essential steps in getting started with your site. If you want more information, you should read the other articles. However, the above tutorial should be enough to help you put your ideas on the Internet.
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