Before you start building a website, you have to know a few things about domain names and hosting. Domain Names and Hosting are what defines your website and the place it will be stored on the Internet.
Domain Names & Hosting
A Domain Name is the name you will give to your website. It will exist as “YourDomainName.com”, “YourDomainName.info” or “YourDomainName.net”, etc. A domain name ending in the .com is highly recommended.
When building a website, you must give it a name and that name will be identified using the above mentioned format. It is good to know that the choice of a Domain Name should be inline with the name of the business in which you are dealing. For Example, a website about loosing fat in 21 days may be having a domain name such as “loosefatin21days.com”. The name reflects the content the visitor expects to find and the search engines will also find your website very easily when a visitor types keywords such as “loose fat” or “weigh Loss”, etc.
To get your domain name, you must choose a name related to your business and register it with Domain Registrars. A Domain Registrar is a Company that provides Domain Names and Hosting services on the Internet. There are many Registrars offering different services.
Once you register your domain name, you must find a place to store it. The storage of the domain name is called hosting. Hosting facilities are also provided by companies providing registration. But you may choose to register at one place and host at some other place. That’s up to you. It is however easier to host the domain at a company which provides both registration and hosting.
Before registering your domain name you must determine what you will be doing with it. If you will be creating a content website, you may register your domain name at a registrar which provides single domain (.com, .net, .org, .info, etc.) per registration. If you plan to sell items on the Internet, then you should look for a company which provides unlimited subdomains in addition to your main domain. A subdomain is an addition to your main domain. Usually it will be referred using the format “subdomain.YourMainDomain.com”. Having unlimited subdomains will allow you to create a subdomain for each item you are selling into separate folders on your host and you will have to pay only for the main domain. You must look for the hosting plans for domains when you are registering your domain.
Attention! When you have decided to register your domain name, do not start by registering it. What you should do is to look for Hosting first. Most Companies providing hosting solutions for domains will give you a free domain name when you choose a hosting solution. So why register a domain name and pay separately and also pay for hosting again? These may be obtained as one package and will save you money.
Another point of importance here is that, you do not create a website and host it on free hosting accounts. If you are serious about doing business, you must buy a domain name and hosting solution from a private company.
Whenever you use a free hosting, your domain will not appear as an upper level domain but it will be a second or third level domain. An example would be www.freehost.com/id number/yourdomainname. This makes it difficult for the search engine spiders to find your domain name. You should host your domain name at a private company and pay the required fees for hosting.
I recommend you choose a hosting solution at www.justhost.com they give you unlimited free subdomains and many more facilities together with a free domain name. You will pay only for the main domain and hosting.
Skills required to build a website
Before you start building a Website, you have to decide about the topic of your website. It will be very much easy for you to build a website on a topic that you know well or you have expert knowledge because this will enable you to create unique content. Remember that Search Engines bans duplicate content and your website will not be ranked in the top search engine results.
What skills do you need to be able to build a website? Well, you will need a basic understanding of Web Programming using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the computer language which interpretes the codes in your web pages and display them in your browser when you open the web page.
This is not a mandatory requirement, but knowing it will help you a lot in the design of your web pages specially in the formatting of the pages to make them appealing to your visitors.
A knowledge of Style Sheets is also recommended and this will save you a lot of time when it comes to maintaining your site or even when creating a lot of web pages for your site. Style Sheets are known as Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS) and these allow you to keep the formatting of the web page separate from the content you write. In this manner the same Style Sheet can be applied to more than one page and when you want to modify a particular formatting in your page, you just have to do the modification in the Style Sheet and the formatting of all the pages using the Style Sheet will be done automatically.
Steps required to build a website
Step 1: Choosing a niche
The first step is to choose a niche on which you are going to build a website. A niche is a section or a sub-section of a broader theme. Examples of niches are “Weigh Loss”, “Internet Marketing”, “Dog Training”, “Stress”, “Food and Fitness”, etc.
Make a list of topics on which you can write a lot of content and search for each of them using Google Keyword Research Tool. This will enable you to find how much competition already exists. If you decide to create a website on a theme that has a huge competition, it is most likely that people will not find your website as it will not be able to rank in the top search results. Unless you want to spend a lot of time performing search engine optimization or tweaking it in some other way, there is a good chance that it will be lost in the so many already existing websites in your niche on the Internet.
You have to make a research and find a niche with a reasonable competition and where there is a high demand but limited supply in terms of websites dealing with the themes in your niche.
Step 2: Planning your website contents
After deciding on the niche, you have to draw a plan of your website clearly identifying the main contents and all the subcontents that you will be including. Your niche gives you the main topic based on which you have to create unique contents. Make a break down of the main topic into sub topics that will be dealt separately. Create a webpage for each topic or subtopic and make it Keyword Focused Page Content (KFPC). Once you have done this, you are ready to create the webpages.
Step 3: Creating your webpages
To create a webpage, you have to write the HTML codes that will build-up your page contents. If you know HTML you can do it easily. HTML is a very easy language to learn and use. You can use the windows notepad editor to create the HTML document. Remember that the filename extension should be .htm or .html.
Create a webpage for each of your Keyword Focused Page Content one by one and create the links that enable navigation between the different pages.
You can also use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to build up your webpages. You can download a free WYSIWYG editor called Kompozer here…
This editor is similar to a word processor and is free. You may also use Adobe Dreamweaver to create your webpages but you have to pay to get it.
The main page of your website must be named “index.htm” or “index.html”. Whenever you type an address in the address bar of your browser, for example http://www.yahoo.com/ and press enter, the index.htm or index.html will be loaded by default.
Step 4: Uploading your webpages to your host server
The next step is to upload all your webpages to your hosting account. Once you do this, allow up to 24 hours for your site to get propagated over the internet. Once it is propagated and known to various servers on the Internet, you may access your website by using your domain name.
To upload your website files to your hosting server, you will need to use a FTP Client. This is a software that transfers files from one computer to a server computer. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, the protocol used for transfering files between computers. The FTP Client is a tool which is used for this purpose. You may download a free copy of an FTP Client software called FileZilla here…
Step 5: Testing your website
The next step is to test your website. You do this by loading your website from your browser and testing that all the links work correctly. If you find errors or broken links, modify the respective file on your computer and upload this file only to youir server, thereby replacing the old version on the server to bring it up to date.
Step 6: Bringing Traffic to your website
After your website is live on the Internet and you have done the testing and corrected all the errors you may have found, you have to bring traffic to your website. You may do this by using Internet Marketing Techniques such as Article Marketing, Blogging, Email Marketing, etc.
