. Get Your Domain Name
The first thing you need to do before anything else is to get yourself a
domain name. This is the name you want to give to your website.
For example, the domain name of the website you're reading is
"thesitewizard.com". To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee
to a
registrar for the right to use that name. Getting a name does not get
you a website or anything like that. It's just a name. It's sort of like
registering a business name in the brick-and-mortar world; having that
business name does not mean that you also have
the shop premises to go with it.
Choose a Web Host and Sign Up for an Account
A web host is basically a company that has many computers connected to
the Internet. When you place your web pages on their computers, everyone
in
the world will be able to connect to it and view them. You will need to
sign up for an account with a web host so that your website has a home.
If getting a domain name is analogous to getting a business name in the
brick-and-mortar world, getting a web hosting account is comparable
to renting office or shop premises for your business.
After you sign up for a web hosting account, you will need to point your
domain to that account on your web host. Information on how
to do this can be found in the guide
How to Point a Domain Name to Your Website (Or What to Do After Buying Your Domain Name).
Designing your Web Pages
Once you have settled your domain name and web host, the next step is to
design the web site itself. In this article, I will assume that you
will
be doing this yourself. If you are hiring a web designer to do it for
you, you can probably skip this step, since that person will
handle it on your behalf.
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Although there are many considerations in web design, as a beginner,
your first step is to actually get something out onto the web. The
fine-tuning
can come after you've figured out how to publish a basic web page. One
way is to use a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") web editor
to do it. Such editors allow you to design your site visually, without
having to muck around with the technical details. They work just like a
normal
wordprocessor.
There are a number of free and commercial web editors around. One free (and open source) editor for Windows, Mac OS X
and Linux is BlueGriffon. You can find a guide on how to use this editor from my
BlueGriffon Tutorial.
The guide takes you through the process of designing a website from scratch so that you end up with a fully-functional
site, complete with multiple pages and a feedback form. (Instructions on how to get BlueGriffon can be found in
that tutorial.)
For those who prefer to use a commercial program, thesitewizard.com has numerous online tutorials for a web editor called
Dreamweaver. The Dreamweaver
Tutorial: How to Design a Website with Dreamweaver CS6 also takes you through all the steps needed to design a
complete website, in addition to providing you with the theoretical and practical foundations that will help you create
and maintain the site.
There are many other web design software around. If you prefer not to use either of the above, you can find
tutorials for other WYSIWYG web editors
here, including one for KompoZer,
another free (though somewhat outdated) web editor. And if none of them suits your taste, there are also
numerous other programs listed on thefreecountry.com's Free
HTML Editors and WYSIWYG Web Editors page.
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After you have followed my tutorial, and are on the way to designing your website, you might want to read the article
Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility in Web Design
as well. It takes a brief look at some of the real world issues that every web designer must deal with.
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An integral part of web design is search engine readiness. Search engine promotion does not start after the web site is made.
It starts at the web design stage. The article
6 Tips on How to Create a Search Engine
Friendly Website is a must-read. Moreover, How to
Improve Your Search Engine Ranking on Google is also important for the simple reason that Google is the most popular search
engine around, at least at the time this page was written.
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There are many other issues regarding the design of web pages. The above
will get you started. However, if you have the time after you get
something out onto the web, you may want to read my other articles on
Web Design and
Website Promotion and Search Engine Ranking.
Testing Your Website
Although I list this step separately, it should be done throughout your web design cycle. I list it here to give it
a little more prominence, since too few new webmasters actually perform it adequately.
You will need to test your web pages as you design them in the major browsers:
Chrome,
Firefox,
Safari
and Internet Explorer 11. All these browsers can be obtained free of charge, so it should be no hardship to get them.
Unfortunately, directly testing your site is the only way you can be really sure that it works
the way you want it to on your visitors' machines. And those with access to Windows 10 should also
test with Microsoft Edge, the successor to Internet Explorer. In addition, if you have a smartphone,
try out your site there too.
For those who don't have Windows 10 but need Microsoft Edge, and those who run a Mac (and thus do not have
either Edge or Internet Explorer), all is not lost. You can use a piece of software called a virtual machine,
which mimics a completely separate computer running within your real computer. Information about this can be found
in the article
How to Check
Your Website with Multiple Browsers on a Single Machine (Cross-Browser Compatibility Checking). Note that although
that article speaks about testing with different versions of Internet Explorer, the method mentioned can also be used
to obtain and test Edge, since Microsoft makes the latter available free of charge from the same location.
And where Internet Explorer is concerned, you probably do not need to get any version other than 11, since
most people seem to have
upgraded from the older versions (at least on my sites).
If you want to improve the chances that your website will work in future versions of all web browsers, consider
validating the code for your
web pages. In layman's language, this means that you should check that the underlying code of your web page, called
"HTML"
and "CSS", has no syntax errors. You don't actually need technical knowledge of HTML and CSS to validate the page,
since you can use one of the numerous
free web page validators around to do the hard work. On the other hand, if the validator tells you that your page has
errors, it may sometimes be hard to figure out what's wrong (and whether the error is actually a serious one) if you don't
have the requisite knowledge. Having said that, some validators actually give concrete suggestions on how to fix your code,
and one of them, called "HTML Tidy", is even supposed to be able to fix errors for you.
Collecting Credit Card Information, Making Money
If you are selling products or services, you will need some way to collect credit card information. If so, take a look at
How to Accept Credit Cards on Your Website. I also have
a step by step guide on How to Add an Order Form or
a "Buy Now" button using PayPal to a Website for those using PayPal.
If you need advertisers for your website, you might want to read
How to Make Money From Your Website and the follow-up
article How to Increase Your Website Revenue from Affiliate Programs.
A list of advertisers and affiliate programs can be found on
Affiliate Programs: Free Sponsors and Advertisers.
Those companies are on the constant lookout for new web publishers to display their advertisements.
Getting Your Site Noticed
When your site is ready, you can submit it to search engines like Google and Bing. Use the links
below to do this.
In general, if your site is already linked to by other websites, you may not even need to submit it to these search engines.
They will probably find it themselves by following the links on those websites.
Apart from submitting your site to the search engine, you may also want to consider promoting it in other ways, such as
the usual way people did things before the creation of the Internet: advertisements in the newspapers, word-of-mouth, etc.
There are even companies on the Internet, like PRWeb,
that can help you create press releases, which may get your site noticed by news sites and
blogs.
As mentioned in my article on More
Tips on Google Search Engine Results Placement, you can also advertise in the various search engines. Although I
only mentioned Google in that article, since that was the topic of that discussion, you can also
advertise
in other search engines like Bing and Yahoo!.
This has the potential of putting your advertisement near the top of the search engine results page, and possibly even
on other websites.
There are also
less obvious ways of promoting your website, which you might
want to look into.
Conclusion
Naturally the above guide is not exhaustive. It is a distillation of
some of the essential steps in getting started with your site. If you
want more
information, you should read the other articles on
thesitewizard.com. However, the
above tutorial should be enough to help you put your website on the Internet.