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6 Steps to create Your Own Website: For Beginners
This page explains everything that is needed for anyone wanting to create their own web page. It is intended for the beginner and layperson, taking you step by step through the whole process from the very beginning I hope this guide is helpful.
1. Get Your Domain Name
The first thing you need to do before anything else is to get yourself a domain name. A domain name is the name you want to give to your website. For example, the domain name of the website you’re reading is “nirmal.com.np”. To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. But to register a domain like mine nirmal.com.np, you don’t need to pay. You can register from Mercantile Communications Pvt. Ltd. You just need is your photocopy of Citizenship and letter head. But remember 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 the name.
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 analogous to renting office premises for your business.
After you sign up for a web hosting account, you will need to point your domain to that account on your web host.
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 this step. Basically there are types of design; static web and dynamic web. Here are some steps to know about basic static web page designing. But you can use open source for the dynamic content management system. In present context open source are becoming more popular like wordpress, joomla, drupal, umbraco, mambo, magento, zen cart, tomato etc. These all are open source content management system. They provide free open source content management system (CMS). But designing part is yours, you need to design your front-end. So, you must know the general knowledge about html and css.
- 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 get a basic web page onto your site. 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 muck around with the technical details. They work just like a normal wordprocessor.
- There are many commercial and free web editors around. For those who don’t mind spending money on a good commercial web editor, one of the most highly-regarded WYSIWYG web editors is Dreamweaver. You can learn dreamweaver tutorial online like w3schools.com. The tutorial takes you through all the steps of creating a fully-functional website with multiple pages and a feedback form, and provides you with the theoretical and practical foundation that will help you create and maintain your site.
- There are many other web design software around. If you prefer not to use either of the above, you can find some others listed on thefreecountry.com’s Free HTML Editors and WYSIWYG Web Editors page.
- After you have followed my tutorial, and are on the way to designing your website, you must give priority to Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility in Web Design as well.
- 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.
- There are many other issues regarding the design of web pages. The above will get you started for the static web design. However, if you have the time after you get something out onto the web, you may want to read more articles online.
4. Testing Your Website
Although I list this step separately, this should be done throughout your web design cycle. I list it separately to give it a little more prominence, since too few new webmasters actually perform this step adequately.
You will need to test your web pages as you design them in the major browsers: Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6, the latest versions of Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. Since all these browsers are free anyway, it should not be any hardship to get them and install them. The trick however, is testing with more than one version of Internet Explorer since the later version will overwrite the earlier.
One way to improve your chances that your website will work in future versions of the web browsers is to make sure your web pages’ code validate as correct (that is, the underlying code has no errors). There are numerous free web page validators listed on the Free HTML Validators, Broken Link Checkers, Browser Compatibility Checkers page.
5. Integrating Paypal and Afilliate Programs
If you are selling products or services, you will need some way to collect credit card information. You have to learn step by step guide to set up paypal account.
If you need advertisers for your website, you can get many online affiliation programs. A list of advertisers and affiliate programs can be found by searching Affiliate Programs: Free Sponsors and Advertisers. Those companies are on the constant lookout for new web publishers to display their advertisements.
6. Getting Your Site Noticed
When your site is ready, you will need to submit your site to the search engines, particularly Google. You can find the Google submission page by clicking on the “About Google” link on Google, and then locating the “Submit your content to Google” link on the page that appears. However, submitting your site to Google alone is, quite frankly, a pointless endeavour. If there are no other links to your site on the web, Google will be appear most reluctant to index your site and show results that include your pages. If there are many other links to your site, you don’t even have to bother to submit it to Google — it will find your site by itself.
This is where promoting your website is important. This involves many things, including the usual way people did things before the Internet: advertisements in the newspapers, word-of-mouth, etc. You might want to consider advertising on places like Yahoo! (which puts your ads on Yahoo!, AltaVista and CNN), or Google. Google ads can be a quick way to get onto the first page of a search engine’s results page.
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 on my site. I have posted many articles related to open source cms and web related services. However, the above tutorial should be enough to help you put your website on the Internet.
About the Author
This is Nirmal Gyanwali, a tech blogger and web developer from kathmandu, Nepal. I am currently studying M.Sc(IT) in Sikkim Manipal Univesity.
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