by Carlee Tibbs

Created on: October 10, 2010

Whether you want your own website for business purposes, to create a community of like-minded people or for other personal uses, there are many ways to get a website.

The very first thing you should do is to get a webhost. There are many different companies to choose from, with prices starting at $0.
If you decide to go with a free webhost, such as freewebs.com or 250free.com, your new website will most likely contain unsightly adverts from the companies; this is what keeps your website free. You will also only get a small amount of webspace and bandwidth (which is how much information can be downloaded or viewed from your website).

You will usually have an option to upgrade with your free webhost and, for a small amount of money, your website will no longer contain advertising and you will usually get more webspace and bandwidth.

You could also buy webhosting from reliable and reputable webhosts such as surpasshosting.com, asmallorange.com or geekstorage.com. If you decide to go with a paid webhost, you should consider buying your own domain name (a “dotcom”), as most paid webhosts don’t give you a free URL / website address.

If you’re going to pay for your webhosting, I would recommend buying from a webhost that only sells hosting, rather than paying for an account on a free webhost; the paid webhosts offer superior customer support and offer much more space and bandwidth than you would get as a paying customer at a free webhost.

If you would like a domain name or “dotcom” for your website, you can buy one from godaddy.com, 123-reg.co.uk or namecheap.com.

The next thing you would need to consider is how are you going to manage your website? Are you going to learn how to code and design your own website yourself or would you rather go with a Content Management System, such as WordPress (which is typically a blogging tool but can be used to create “static” websites), where everything is coded for you and you can get many different designs for free?

If you would like to learn to code your website yourself, you will need to learn how to use HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). You can do this through many tutorials you can find on the Internet but the best place to learn is from the creators of HTML and CSS; w3schools.com. You can code your website using Notepad (which comes free with all Windows computers) or Notepad++, which is also free and can be downloaded from sourceforge.net.

If you don’t wish to code the HTML and CSS yourself but also don’t wish to use a CMS, you could use a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor, such as Dreamweaver or MicroSoft FrontPage.

To get your newly created content onto your website, you can either upload the files individually and directly through your browser, or you can use a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client, such as FileZilla (filezilla-project.org), BulletProof FTP (bpftp.com) or CuteFTP (cuteftp.com). If you choose to use an FTP client, check first with your webhost that you have the required permissions (most free webhosts won’t allow FTP) and to obtain the settings you will need to use in order for the FTP client to connect to your website.

Learn more about this author, Carlee Tibbs.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.