The Internet is a great place and you have probably been using it for sometime. Now you might be ready to start thinking about building your own website, however you are totally a novice and you dont know where to start.
In this article I will take you through the steps of starting to build your own and very first website. You've probably heard all of the buzz words but you are really unsure where to begin. What is required for you to run your own website and what programs should I use to build are all answered in this easy to follow article where I have left out all of the confusion for another day.
Stage 1: Whats your website about?
What do you need to build a website? Perhaps you have something interesting to share with others or you would like to show off to family and friends. You might have a business and you are looking to move 1 step closer to placing your products and services online. Whatever you want to do, its easy to get started and all you need to start with is the ideas. Thinking about the content and information you are going to place onto your website is probably the hardest thing to do.
When you start to actually construct your website, it is vital that you are aware of what you are actually going to place online. This will improve the construction because you, in your own mind, have a rough idea of how the page may look.
The best way to get ideas is to look at other websites. Try doing a search on some search engines for something related to your interests. Its best to learn from others initially.
Take sometime to think about how your main front page will look. You are going to probably require more than 1 page, so think about how you can spread your content and ideas over several pages. Perhaps to give you an idea, if you are a business, the standard number of pages would be 4. These pages may contain the following:
Page 1: The Main Home Page (Welcome)
Page 2: About Your Company (History etc)
Page 3: Services or Products
Page 4: Contacts Page
It's quite simple, page 1 has to be your home page. A home page is the term to describe the very first page of your website. This could be described as the main index or contents of your website.
Page 2 could be a page describing exactly what your company does. This is an ideal page for placing some history about your company. Why not place a nice picture of the front of your offices at the top of this page.
Page 3 usually describes your products or services. Try and think about sales techniques at this stage. Describing your products and services correctly is the key element to your website. With this page probably being one of the most visited by Internet users, you want to ensure that you catch the readers eye.
Page 4 can contain a contact form which allows people to fill in the empty fields and press a submit button to quickly and effictivly contact you. Take a look at our Contact Us page to get an idea of how this works. If a contact form is something you don't want to get involved in straight away, then a general guideline is to include your companies address, telephone number and email address. This usually works well and is highly recommended. You also might want to think about placing a map on this page. Ideal if people need to know how to find you.
Ok, so now you have a rough idea of how your website is going to be laid out. Now we need to look at the design phase of your website.
Stage 2: The Commercial Internet
Building your website does not have to cost you anything. You can build your website for Free, however before you decide to spend money it is worth knowing about the important functions which make up the process of making your website live.
Your home or business computer is only useful for building websites in a sense. Once you have built your website, you need to move it somewhere on the Internet which will allow it to be publically available. So the next stage in the development process, before you start building your site, you need find out where you can place your website. This is called Hosting and it can play an important part in the progress of your website on the Internet.
Hosting your website does not have to cost you anything. There are a number of hosting providers on the Internet which will allow you to place your pages onto their computers to be made live. As a bit of background, the hosting provider has permanent connections to the Internet which allows visitors to view information on there computers 24 hours a day. Its a bit like having your own computer connected to the Internet 24 hours a day and by having your information made public.
There are a number of other methods of placing your website online, however these are beyond the scope of this introduction. We are just focusing on the getting started phase.
Ok, so we need to find someone on the Internet which will allow you to place your website online without costing you a penny. Well, as you are just a beginner let me recommend Yahoo's Geocities.
Yahoo! GeoCities is a publishing community where you can set-up your own web site for free. They provide you with all the tools you need to create and maintain your presence on the web.
Geocities have several ways for you to create and publish your website. Choose from the step-by-step Yahoo! PageWizards for beginners, to the File Manager and Advanced HTML Editor for more advanced users. And in-between there's Yahoo! PageBuilder--their flexible and powerful drag & drop editor.
NOTE: HTML(Hypertext Markup Language) is the term to describe the language which makes up each part of your webpage. Don't worry about this for now though.
In general, Geocities gives you the tools and the facility to place your webpage online. It's an excellent place to get started and in no time you will have your own website online.
In order to use their service, you will need to sign up for a Geocites account. As said before, it's totally free and you are required to do this before progressing with this article. The Internet web address is:
http://geocities.yahoo.com/home/
Click on the link above. On the website, select the Build Your Website link in the center of the page. Make sure you follow all on screen questions and return back here when you are finished.
You will find that Geocities will ask you some details about your website straight away. If you can answer these questions now, it is advisable. Once completed, remember to write down your user id and password for later use. This is really important and you should not forget it. Your Geocities website will contain your Geocities ID as part of the web address.
In a few moments you should receive an email from Geocities describing everything you need to know about building your website. We will cover this in Part 2 of our tutorial and look forward to actually building our first page.
Steven Salmon is the editor and designer of The Beginners Online Workshop. He is always interested in your views and ideas, please do not hesitate to contact him at ssalmon@btinternet.com.
