It seems that these days everybody has a website! And it’s so simple to create your own, why not?
There are several reasons why you might want to run a website. You might feel passionately about an interest or hobby you have, and want an outlet for self expression. Or maybe you feel like you want to help others by providing advice on a subject you have knowledge about. Or maybe you just want to make money online! Whatever your motivation for creating a website, you’ll need to consider the following:
- domain name
- hosting
- the website platform
Let’s go through each of these in turn.
Domain Name
If a website is the equivalent of a house, then the domain name is the address of the house. It uniquely identifies the website and no two websites can share the same domain name. Your domain name can have a variety of extensions, like .com, .net, .org etc. If you are just starting out creating websites, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the extension, otherwise known as the Top Level Domain (TLD). It really doesn’t matter what TLD you use.
Domain names are pretty cheap and you should be able to buy one for under $10. Note that this price is per year, so in actual fact you are leasing the domain. If, after owning the domain for a couple of years, you don’t renew your domain, then it will expire. At that point, someone else can register it.
There are lots of domain registrars, like godaddy, sedo, name and namecheap.
Website Hosting
Using the house analogy again, website hosting is equivalent to the land that the house is built on. It is where the files that make up your website live. Imagine a Word document on your computer. For another analogy, that Word document is your website, your hard drive is the web space where your site lives and your computer is the web hosting. Of course, there may be many files that make up your website, but you get the picture.
Like domain names, hosting is pretty cheap. You can usually get a deal for around $5 / month. Often hosts offer deals where you can host an “unlimited” number of domains. If you think that you might create several websites in the future, then these “unlimited” deals pay for themselves very quickly.
Popular web hosts include hostgator, godaddy and site5.
Website Platform
You have a few options when it comes to actually creating your website. If you like getting your hands dirty with the technical side of websites, you might like to code the website yourself. If you intend the site to be pretty static (i.e. you don’t require any that it have any interactivity with your visitors), then you just need to code your site using HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). If you need a dynamic site that uses a database, then you probably need to use a server side language like PHP or ASP.NET.
If you want a ready made solution to get up and running quickly, without having to do any coding whatsoever, then you should consider a Content Management System (CMS). WordPress is a very good CMS that can get your website live in a matter of minutes and many web hosts provide one click installs. These one click installs allow you to install WordPress on your website even if you have no technical skills. If you are a beginner and want to get started as quickly as possible, I would recommend using WordPress. Stay tuned for some WordPress tutorials! WordPress is good because it’s free and it’s easy for non-technical people to use.
