Building your website
So how do you start a website? Well you’ll need to do a couple of things, A domain name, a hosting provider, a content management system and a design.
Picking a Domain Name
This is getting increasingly difficult. It’s extremely hard to pick up decent domain names these days, basically they are all gone. You have to be extremely creative to get a good one, it is possible. Just use your imagination. Most dot com domains will set you back about $10 per year, you can check the availablity of them by going to Godaddy or similar domain registrar company.
If you can create a domain that’s memorable all the better. It certainly helps if it’s something that will stick in peoples minds and is brandable. I would also recommend going for a dot com domain, or if your site is for your locality then use your countries domain name. Apparently Google is starting to rank these higher for local searches.
Finding a hosting provider
There are absolutely thousands of hosting providers out there, its a difficult choice. To confuse things further there are various types of hosting plans usually offered. You can get shared hosting, dedicated hosted (managed or unmanaged), and colocation, which is basically providing your own server.
If like me and you can do some of the management yourself the you can get an unmanaged dedicated server, though you will usually need some system administration skills or long hair, unix beard and death metal t-shirt. If you have these skills though it’s worth asking whether you have root access to the server. Not all hosts allow it.
For many users starting out with their first online venture I would recommend a low-cost shared hosting plan, which allows you to perform most task from a simple web-host control panel. One such hosting company that offer this is DreamHost. This also has the advantage of offering one click software installs, for non-techies this is a godsend. An added bonus is the free domain name with your account.
Choosing a Content Management System
Web technology has progressed by leaps and bounds in the past 5 years. Most people who create websites no longer have the laborious task of putting these together in Dreamweaver or similar. That’s soooo web 1.0. Nowadays people use some for of CMS to build there site and manage their content.
There are tons of Content Management System’s out there. Some are simple and quick to use, others have tons of options but require quite a learning curve to really get to grips with and start using them effectively.
For my upcoming project I will be using Wordpress, in fact this site is built on Wordpress and in all honestly I have tried quite a few others and nothing comes close for it’s simplicity. It doesn’t have all the features of some cms but it’s not bloated with things you won’t need either. Of course, wordpress is primarily designed to run blogs, but there are a lot of people that use it in other ways, and have a static front page instead of the lastest posts displayed.
If like me you are planning to use Wordpress, you’ll find it in incredibly easy to install, for the totally non-techie though you can you DreamHosts one click installs if you choose them as your hosting company.
Creating a website design
There are tons of tools out there to create website, my personal favourite is still actually dreamweaver and fireworks to mock up graphics. Both are pretty easy to learn even for non-techies. However, in all honesty these tools have been gathering dust of late.
The reason being, I tend to get my designs online. Not only is this a huge timesaver, most of the designs out there are far better than I could knock together myself. If you are going to use Wordpress then you’ll be pleased to find there are tons of templates out there completely free.
For tons of free ones then check out this site. However if you’d like something a little more professional then your best option would be Template Monster. It all depends how slick you want to be. I’m not sure where I’m going to pick up my design from yet, though I have found a really nice free one on another site which caught my eye. The choice is of course yours for your own site.
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