How to Build a Website

During this tough economical recession or rather depression, many people are looking for alternate ways to earn money. Steady jobs are now lingering on the line; thus, many are getting creative and putting their passions to work. Eventually, we turn to building websites because what better way to get the word out, than the World Wide Web? The best part is, you don't have to be an expert in HTML coding, C++, and other things which are foreign to us average people. Website building has become so simple...

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. To build your own website you need to put a few factors into consideration. You can do that by first asking yourself some questions. What do you need a website for? Okay we established that in our first paragraph: you want to start a business. What kind of business do you intend on starting? Do you want to sell products? Have an informative website? Social site? What exactly do you have on mind? Many people choose to make this step their last one. However, I think that's a big mistake. If you don't know why you need or in my case want a website, then you'll be wasting a whole lot of time for nothing. Once you have that cleared up, you can move on to your next step.

2. You know what you want to do with your site, now all you need are four things, really nothing more to get started.
   
   First you need to decide whether you want your site to be based in a free zone where you would get a sub-domain, something like mysite.freesite.com. If you're building an informal, nonprofessional site, I think that's fine. However, if you want a professional, custom domain, you're going to need to buy one. Domain prices vary from place to place and you have to pay an annual "rent" to keep the domain alive. I personally got my domain from yahoo, during a promotion.

3. So now that you have a domain, where will you put it? You need to find a place to park it, this is place will be your web host. Again decision time. You need to decide if you will use a free hosting site like the one in the resource section or if you will pay for the hosting. I personally used a free web hosting, which will allow me to upgrade to a paid service later on if I need advanced options.

4. Once you have your domain and web hosting, you need to start working on your site. You know what you want to do with this site, so get started. You need to add pages to your site, edit things, keep it up to date, put ads if you're interested, and give yourself a name. Join affiliate programs like linkshare (link in resource), where you can earn revenue from your website's traffic. This way you can start making money while your business is getting set up.

5. Last, but certainly not least, you need to advertise. How will people find your site or even know of its existence if you don't tell them. So you need to tell your friends, so they can tell their friends, post flyers, pay to have your site advertised in a local newspaper or online, and get your site seeing by search engine optimization (SEO). You can actually google something like submit URL and you will be able to submit your site's URL for free to search engines.
   
   Now that you know how to build a website, get started.

Resources

• Free Webhosting
• linkshare
• My site