This tutorial shows you how to make or create a website. It is
intended for the beginner and layperson, taking you step by step through
the whole process from the very beginning. It makes very few
assumptions about what you know (other than the fact that you know how
to surf the Internet, since you’re already reading this article on the
Internet). As some steps are more involved, this guide also links to
selected relevant articles on thesitewizard.com that you will need to
click through to read for more information.
The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Own Website
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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.
- Detailed information on getting a good domain name can be found in the article Tips on Choosing a Good Domain Name.
- After you read that, you will need to know the steps to registering a
domain name and the things you need to look out for when registering.
You can find a detailed guide in the article How to Register a Domain
Name.
- It may also be wise to take a look at some of the Important
Precautions to Take When Buying a Domain Name, just so that you don’t
commit the same mistakes that some newcomers make when buying a domain
name.
-
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.
- There are many issues involved in finding a good web host. Read up
on the various things you need to look for in the article How to Choose a
Web Host.
- When you have an idea of what to look for, you can search for one from the Budget Web Hosting page. You can also find out which web host I’m currently using from the Which Web Host Do You Recommend? page.
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).
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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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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Testing Your Website
Although I list this step separately, this should be done throughout
your web design cycle. I list it separately to give it a little more
prominence, since too few new webmasters actually perform this step
adequately.
You will need to test your web pages as you design them in the major
browsers: the latest versions of Internet Explorer (version 11 at the
time of this writing), Firefox, Safari and Chrome.
All these browsers can be obtained free of charge, so it should be no
hardship to get them. Unfortunately, directly testing your site in all
these browsers is the only way you can really be sure that it works the
way you want it to on your visitors’ machines. And those with access to a
Windows 10 machine may also want to test their site in Microsoft Edge,
the successor to Internet Explorer.
Optional: If you have the time, you
may want to read my article on how to test your website in multiple
versions of Internet Explorer and check your site under earlier versions
of Internet Explorer (“IE”). This is not strictly necessary nowadays,
since the main culprit causing website problems, IE 6, is disappearing
from the Internet, with IE 7 following in its heels. In fact, since
Microsoft has stopped supporting Windows XP (the system that includes IE
6) on 8 April 2014, chances are that the number of people using IE 6
and 7 will only dwindle even further with time.
IE 8
and later are generally considered to be standards-compliant, although,
like all browsers, earlier versions don’t support the latest features.
Update (July 2015): For what it’s worth, I no longer bother to test my sites with old versions of IE.
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.
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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.
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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.
