How to Create a Website

Having a website allows you to share your message with the whole world.

A website can be the launch of your eBusiness, the collection of family photos for posterity or just the place where you publish your novel, one chapter at a time. Whatever the reason, you can create your own site in as little as a few minutes -- though a custom site can take much longer. The tools are available to automate the process from registration to coding and publishing, or your can put things together manually and learn the programming code necessary. Those choices are up to you, but basic website creation follows the same steps.

Things You'll Need

• Computer
• Internet access
• Real player (media)

Instructions

Automated Web Design

1. Browse to one of the automatic website creation sites available online. Some popular choices are Weebly.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. With these tools you can quickly create a site from pre-made templates, and have it online in just a few minutes. Note that if you want to have your own domain name, you will need to pay to register it. The Weebly and Blogger services allow you to register the domain name through their sites.

2. Create an account with the website creation service. For example, with Blogger, you can log in with your Google Account. With Weebly and WordPress you will need to create a new account. Once you log in, select the option to create a new site.

3. Add elements to your site using the templates and editor available. Automatic website design tools like these will provide you with the basic elements of a site, but any customization will be up to you. Weebly and Blogger provide from some graphical editing of the elements on your new site. You can always jump in and edit the hypertext markup language -- that's HTML -- if you want to tweak the little details.

4. Publish your site. Once you're done adding the elements like pictures and text using the editing tools you can click a button to publish the site and it's live on the Internet for all to see. Typically tools like Blogger and WordPress are used to create blog sites where you can update the information in posts without having to edit the basic elements of the site. The posts just scroll down the page as you add new ones to the top. Weebly is a better choice for creating a static website where you might want to provide information that won't be changing frequently.

Manual Website Creation

1. Register a domain name for your site. You will do this at a domain name registrar like GoDaddy.com, NetworkSolutions.com or, if you want to use Google Apps on your new site, Google.com/a/cpanel/domain. You will have to pay a registration fee to secure the domain name that you want and you can only register a domain if no one else owns it yet. If your top choice is taken, you might select a variant like taking a ".NET" instead of a ".COM" domain.

2. Secure a Web host. Typically you can package your hosting with your domain name registration, but you don't have to do them together. The host will store the files for your website on Internet connected servers. If you expect to receive a lot of traffic or you need secure hosting for eCommerce, you may want to spend some more money for hosting. Often you can get basic hosting for free with your domain. Some host options are GoDaddy.com, PowWeb.com and FatCow.com.

3. Create the website content. You can do this manually by learning a programming language like HTML, XHTML, CSS or Java to code out the specific attributes of your website. You can also use programs to create the site on your computer using a graphical interface. Some options for software are Adobe's Dreamweaver, CoffeeCup or even your favorite desktop publishing software. Save the created files to the same folder on your computer.

4. Upload the website files to your hosting service. This will typically be done through a file transfer protocol service. Your host will give you a username and password with which you can log in to its FTP site and transfer your files. Load all of the flies associated with your website, including the images referenced by your code. If all of the files referenced by the code aren't uploaded then the site won't work like you planned it.

5. Browse to your domain name in a Web browser to see your site live on the Internet.

Tips & Warnings

• The last three letters of a domain name are known as the top level domain, or TLD. By far the most popular TLD is .COM, with .ORG and .NET being well recognized as well.

References

• W3 Schools: HTML Default