Create a Website

Welcome! Chances are that if you found this website, you are looking to establish an online presence for your business or for your personal needs. Either of which is great, you came to the right place.

There are many many ways to building a website, and if this is your first attempt at it hopefully it will be a pleasant experience for you. First thing you should know is that building a site can be a very daunting task, more so for someone with little to no programming experience. This site focuses more on the theory of how to create a website, if you want more of a hands-on programming experience I would suggest checking out my blog Website Insanity Blog.

The best way to learn is to read and learn all you can about making websites from people who have already experienced it and have been in your shoes in the past.

Basics needed to start a website

1. Choose a domain - (www.yourwebsitename.com) - This is really the single most challenging aspect when it comes to creating a website.

You want to find a name that is going to help your site stand out from the rest. And I say it's challenging because most of the common name websites, or short and sweet domain names have been taken.

Either by legitimate individuals and businesses or by someone trying to make a quick buck on the popularity of the name (they buy a domain they think may be popular and then later sell to highest bidder). Continue with choosing the right domain for your site.


2. Choose a web host - (where your web files will be hosted) I guess this is kind of a no-brainer, if you are going to run a business you wouldn't want to run your money-making machine on a free hosting service, especially when you can get great hosting for less than $4/month.

Follow up with deciding what hosting company to use and what software you will need to interact with your hosting package on our page - choosing a good web host


3. Create Your website - (putting your .html files in check) .html or .htm files are the bread and butter of building static websites. If you want visitors to be able to search your site or register and login to interact with your site it becomes a dynamically updated site.

These require file types of .php which stands for Hypertext PreProcessor language or .asp files (both of which require a database in the background), all of which can be edited and created using what is known as a text editor.

My personal favorites are Notepad++ which is FREE and handles a wide variety of languages and Adobe's Dreamweaver not free, both color code the programming languages very nicely. Continue to build a website here.

How websites are made

The best ways to learn about creating a website should be with xhtml and css. What in the world is that you ask? XHTML is a cleaner version of HTML which allows for basic content addition to the website. CSS on the other hand is what tells the content how to be displayed to the user, make sense yet?

It used to be that websites were created using frames and tables in html, tables were and always have been used for displaying data, but web developers found clever ways of manipulating tables to display the content to users, this was very hard to control and was usually a mess on the development side.

What did we use to build our website?

This website is using xhtml and CSS with a 3 Column CSS Layout geared towards pleasing the search engine gods (while using php includes).

What I mean by that is this, search engines love clean code that is easy to read, they (search engines) are not smart enough to interpret images, flash, or javascript.

However, most people still use images with SEO Friendly alt Text and they use javascript but just not for their navigation menu because your site won't be indexed.

Lastly, people still use Flash animation, but just not as much as it once was, it used to be widely used for a splash (or Intro) page but the search engine spiders were not indexing sites that followed this practice, and their audience was not being reached.

Website Basics

Compensation

I think all should know that I am financially compensated if I provide referrals to some but not all the products that I recommend on this site. However, I do personally use SEOMoz for my SEO purposes, HostGator for all my website hosting (including this site) and GoDaddy for all my 15+ Domains. Therefore, my recommendations are not blindly leading anyone into oblivion.

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