How to Create my own Website

You don’t have to be a nerd to create your own personal web site. This article shows you some of the ways you can build your own web presence.

Every business, great or small, needs a website in the 21^st century. Without an online presence you may as well not exist. As a individual your own web site can act as a depository of your personal data; text, photos and videos that you can share with friends and family. Although many public sites exist for this purpose, such as Facebook and YouTube, having your own site gives you complete control.

Your own Address on the Web: the Domain Name and Web Hosting

No matter  how your web site is created it needs a place to live on the web. The site itself is a bunch of files on a web server – a computer which is part of the network that is the Internet. Many companies provide very cheap hosting. They will give your site a home on the Internet for as little as $6 a month.

When you have a host for your site people will need to find it by using a domain name. That’s the bit after the www which is the address of your site, such as selfhelparticles.net! You can usually buy a domain name from your hosting company when you sign up with them, or from a third party domain registration company. The cost will vary according to the type of domain. If you want your location to be neutral get a .com. Every country has its own domain suffix, e.g. .co.uk for the UK, .fr for France and .au for Australia.

Build your web site

Now we need to create the site itself. A web site is really an collection of HTML files connected together, and to other sites, by hyperlinks. There are several methods with varying levels of technical expertise required.

1) Hand-code HTML : if you are a techie at heart you may want to learn HTML, the mark-up language used to build web pages, and build your site by hand-coding. You don’t need any special software for this – just a text editor such as NotePad. The draw-back is that you will have to spend a long time learning HTML, building  the site will be slow and time-consuming and creating a good looking site will be difficult and will depend on your skills as a designer as well as your talents as an HTML guru.

2) Using Web building software : at the next level you can use software to help build your site. There are lots of programs which provide a user-friendly interface. You concentrate on the design and functionality and the software writes the code for you. Adobe Dreamweaver is used by professional web site creators the world over, but there are many cheaper and less sophisticated programs available.

3) Use  a CMS software (Content Management System) : At the next level is the Content Management System. This makes building and collaborating on sites even easier and hides a lot of the complexity of the site from the developer. These systems often provide ‘themes’ which can be ‘plugged-in’ to your site to provide a professional looking design with very little effort. It’s very easy to switch between themes until you are happy with the design, without affecting the text and navigation content of the site. The most popular web CMS systems are Joomla and Drupal but these can be a bit daunting for the beginner. Which brings me to my favourite web building system of them all ….

4) Use WordPress : WordPress is free software which has been used to build millions of blogs which have sprung up on the Internet over the last few years. WordPress  has become so sophisticated that it is now being used to create entire web sites.

It is very easy to use and there are a huge number of ‘widgets’ or plug-ins to give your website  the functionality you require with no coding at all. It also has a wide range of design themes to change the look of your site.

As an added benefit, blogs are incredibly Google friendly, and it is very easy to publish content which appears quickly in Google’s database, so your site can be found by those searching for your service and products.

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