subject: Part 1 Of How To Create A Website: Hosting [print this page] So you want to know how to create a website? Great! Although social media sites like Facebook and Twitter offer a great deal of potential, they are highly limited in their flexibility. In order to fully express yourself, creating your own site from scratch usually is the best way to go. It affords you the greatest amount of control over the product that you will create. However, many people still believe that you must be a computer expert to make a web page. This is not the case. In these articles, I will be detailing the steps you will need to follow to quickly and easily put together your personal or business web presence. Let's get started.
HOW DO I START?
The first thing you will need to do is to conceptualize the site you would like to build. This is easy to do on paper, or in a word processor. I have found that the easiest approach is to draw out your home page on paper in the form of a flow chart of sorts. Draw lines between the elements on the page such as buttons, links and icons to the content that you'd like to appear when those things are clicked. Print out the blocks of text you'd like each page to have and visually link those to where the navigation aids will be on the main page. Once this is done, you will have a good idea in your head and on paper of exactly how the site will "flow".
GET A HOME FOR YOUR SITE
You can't typically serve your web site to the Internet from your home computer. So, you will need a web host. There are many of these available. The best thing you can do is to shop around for the right price for the features you will need. If you are building a simple site with less than 20 pages, only insist on getting about ten megabytes of space. You will need to add to this number if you would like to add downloadable files like music, video or flash animation to your site. (Note that you can get around this by hosting your content somewhere else, such as YouTube, a PhotoBucket or Imgur account, etc. and linking it to your site, thus keeping the required space minimal.)
Once you select a host, you'll need a domain name. This is the address users will enter to visit your site. There are many popular domain registrars, and you can often get a great deal by picking a host that will register your domain and link it to your hosting account for you. That way, you can focus on getting your content online and looking just the way you want it.
After your hosting account is established and your domain name has been selected and linked to it, you'll have a blank slate to begin building your content. You'll be using the concept work you put on paper or built on your computer to do this. Converting it to a coherent web site design is much easier than you may think, and I will walk you through the process. See the next article in this series to learn what to do.
