If you’re in the process of evaluating where you are and where you want to be, you may have decided to reinvent yourself a bit. If a website is part of those plans, but you don’t know where to start. How do I start my own website? These are the basic steps, just so you understand the process. Note that this is a very simplistic look at a very complex topic, so this is just an overview, so you can see the big picture before you begin:
Step 1 – Do you need a domain name. What is a domain name, you ask? I like Wikipedia, its definition is “A domain name It is an identification label that defines an area of administrative autonomy, authority or control on the Internet. Simply put, when you type
Step 2 – You need a place to host your site. Web hosting services are companies that accumulate many servers in a building and offer them to people and companies to host their websites. They do this for a monthly, quarterly, or annual fee. These types of companies generally put together service packages and charge monthly, quarter or year for the service. The web host that I like is a Houston based company, which is very competitive and growing, which means it must be doing something right. That site is hostgator.com. They are a turnkey site and can help you with all aspects of hosting any size website you want to create, from small to large.
Step 3 – Now that you have a domain name and a place to host your site, the hard part begins. The next step in the process of making your own website work online is creating an attractive website, which people will want to visit and possibly buy something. I know that both hostgator and godaddy.com have site builders, or tools that allow you to create a site and get online in a hurry. Talk to them if you want to talk about their services. You can also create your own site using software from any number of companies, one of the most widely used and one of the largest of which is probably Adobe’s Dreamweaver.
Step 4 – Suppose now that you have created a site and are ready to publish it online. The next step is to transfer the files you created, which is your website, and place them within the server space that you are renting from the web host in step 2. If you create the website at home with your own software, you must create the files on your computer and transfer them to the web host’s computer so that they are online. The software has built-in tools that help with this, using the server name and address that you will get from the web host. Once the file transfer is successful, your site will be ONLINE! Every time someone, who has access to the Internet, types your web address, they will be directed to the server of your web host and then to your place, within that server where your files reside and will see your website online.
Step 5 – The last and continuous step is to maintain the content of the site. If you created it with software at home, you will use that software to keep the site up-to-date with updates, when needed. One of the most important things you can do to be successful online is to create a site with current, interesting, and relevant information. When you make a change to the site, you will transfer the files to the server to “update” the files on the host server. When done correctly, anyone accessing your web address now will see the new and updated files. If you use the hosting provider’s software to create the site, you will go back there to make changes and submit them to the hosting provider’s server. Once the change is made and successfully transferred, the online site is updated. The hosting provider’s server will now send the newly updated pages when someone goes online and enters their web address.
conclusion – Regardless of what you are doing, it is always easy and then difficult. Sometimes choosing easy is best to meet your needs right now, and it may change to hard later, but there are trade-offs. Easy, when it comes to creating and updating a website, it may be best handled by someone who knows what they are doing and can do it well and take the headaches away. That can cost you upfront in terms of a fee (paying someone for their expertise). These people don’t work for free and you usually get what you pay for. One suggestion, if someone else is making your website, be sure to keep the rights to the website they are creating for you. Make sure they give you access to make changes on your own and a copy of the files they are transferring, whenever they make updates. That way someone can come in after you’re gone and make changes to the website. You are not stuck with a website that is online, that has to be completely reworked, if you have to fire it for any reason, or they will disappear from you.
The most difficult and inexpensive way would be to learn how to use software like Adobe’s Dreamweaver to create your own websites. You will have full control over your website and will be able to make changes easily and inexpensively. The hard part is that there is a learning curve associated with learning how to use a software package designed to create websites. There is also a learning curve to understanding how to make a great website that looks good and can be found by search engines.
When you hire someone to build a website for you, you should hire someone with experience and who has created other websites that will drive traffic to them. Part of designing a website is creating the back-end HTML code, which makes it easy for search engines to find. That process is called search engine optimization or SEO. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.
This is a very extensive topic, but I wanted to give you some basic steps that you must follow to create a website on the Internet. Perhaps in future articles, I will take each step and expand it and go into more detail. Anyway, here you go, hope this helps you. A website can be a great way for someone to reinvent themselves. It’s quite a complex task to put together, but when all the pieces that make up a website come together, the results can play a big role in the process of reinventing yourself.