Creating Your First Web Site: How To?

Today it is hard to imagine a well developed business or any other type of organization without a good looking website. That’s why we decided to release this step-by step guide to website building and show to entrepreneurs how easy it would be to build and run their company pages.

1. Choosing the Domain

Domain can be chosen on most hosting provider’s websites. If you are trying to make a company website, the domain should contain the company name or its abbreviation or it should closely reflect some of the most popular products or services, company is offering. Domain name should also be easy to brand, that is why long name like Careerbuildingtools.com is not as effective as some shorter ones that emphasize the sole essence of company’s business, like Careerly.com for example, although you should always be careful, avoiding odd misspellings. Be sure to always check your domain on copyright.gov, to make sure you are not infringing anybody’s copyright. When it comes to different personal blogs, websites or other types of online communities, the domain name should emphasize the core purpose, value and function of the page. It should tell people who hear about your website for the first time, what kind of content they will be able to find there.

One of the main doubts when it comes to domain names, is which domain suffix to choose. In an ideal world “.com” suffix should stand for “commercial”, which means for websites used for commercial purposes, “.org” is used for nonprofit organizations and “.net” for network providers. Businesses should always go with “.com” since its s the most widely known domain suffix.

2. Buying a Hosting Plan

Hosting plan purchase looks much more complicated now, with lots of different companies, prices and hosting plan offers. Hosting companies use several different gimmicks in order to attract new customers, such as:

• “Unlimited storage”– there is no such thing as unlimited storage, somewhere deep in the Terms of Service page, there is a paragraph that determines the maximum amount of storage one client can use.
• “Free Domain Name”– although the domain name is free for the first year, usually clients need to pay for domain name renewal, every year after that.
• “Special Discounts”– buying hosting packages on sales can result in much higher costs after the discount period is over.

Accept watching not to fall for these popular tricks, future web administrators also need to review several important parameters when buying their first hosting plan:

1. Is the hosting company’s customer base satisfied with their services?
2. Do they offer commission rebates or coupons?
3. Do they provide good bandwidth quotas?
4. How about disk space terms?

After evaluating all these criteria, you will be able to choose the perfect vps hosting provider. Hosting company will send you the user name and the password for you cpanel account, on which you will be able to install the preferred content management system platform and finally start building your  first website.

3. Choosing the Website Building Platform

There are several popular website builders to choose. They can be free and paid, and these are some of the most famous ones:

WordPress

This is the most famous website builder praised for its capability and open-source nature. It provides extensive amounts of themes and templates, both free and premium ones. Website administrators can go far and wide with WordPress and that is why it is important for them to learn as much functions as possible. Currently WordPress covers around 50% of all websites online.

Light CMS

This is one of the most favorite commercial website builders, that doesn’t have a dashboard, but allows website administrators to modify their website content while browsing the pages and posts. The platform comes with basic set of CMS tools and more advanced users can also implement CSS, JS, HTML and various other languages.

Joomla

This is another open source content management system that stores data in MySQL, uses software design patterns and includes features such ass: RSS feed, page catching, blog, search etc. It is the third most used content management system after WordPress and Drupal.

 

4. Building a Website from Scratch

After downloading the preferred platform you will need to closely follow instructions found in the tutorials and edit different parts of your future website one after another. Some of the main areas you should focus on are:

• Header– It usually contains basic information about the company or the website itself. This part of your website should also include branded content, such as logos, company colors and fancy imagery.
• Menus– This is the main navigation of you website and it directs its viewers towards different pages or posts they wish to see. Menus should be simplified and easy to use and some of the most common pages that are linked to menus of company websites are: Home, About, Our Team, Services, Products, Prices, Blog and Contact.
• Blog– This is the part that makes your website interesting. Blog posts display content to website visitors and they can also be used as a powerful marketing tool, since lots of interesting content brings more viewers to your web  page and therefore more customers who will buy your products or services
• Sidebar– Great place to add some more navigation, banners or AdSense commercials that will make your website even more lucrative.
• Footer– Often used for disclaimers and links to Terms of Service pages, it can also feature some branding logos and company colors, same as the header.

With following these basic instructions and learning more about featured website building platforms from respected tutorials, you will soon be able to start your website and take part into competitive online market of goods and services.

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