Creating Your First Website
Websites can be used for many different purposes.
You can make a personal website or you may want to build a
business website so that you can sell your products online
and promote your business through the means of the Internet.
There are many web-based products which claim
to let you build your own website,but they don’t necessarily
let you customize your website as much as you want since your
are limited to certain templates, because of this you should
always learn how to build your own website from scratch with
HTML.
Learning Languages
To build the most basic of websites you need
to start off by learning HTML and CSS.
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the basic language of
all web pages.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the language used to style
elements on a web page.
If you want to extend the features of your
website to include something dynamic, such as a shopping cart
then you will need to learn a server side web language such
as PHP or ASP.
Once you learn the basics of HTML, CSS, PHP
and ASP, you are ready to start building your website.
Choosing the Design Software
When building a website you need to design
a piece of software, that you will be using to do it. When
choosing web design software, there are several variables
that you should always take into consideration. These considerations
are:
● Cost of the software,
● Complexity of the software, and
● whether you are going to build using your own code.
Now, if you are going to build your website using your own
code then all you need is a text application, such as Microsoft
Notepad.
If you are after a piece of software which you would like
to do all the coding for you and that lets you see the final
outcome without having to do anything complicated then you
want a piece of software, like Adobe’s Dreamweaver.
Getting Your Website onto the Internet
Getting your website onto the Internet doesn’t
have to be the complicated process. All you need to do is
purchase a domain and website hosting and you are all set
to go.
A domain is the address which you type in to go to a website.
A web hosting is relatively quite cheap. After you have purchased
both of these, you should be given access to an online system
known as a ‘control panel’ where you can control
all aspects of your website and its hosting.
To upload your website to your web space
all you need to do is establish an File Transfer Protocol
(FTP) connection with the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server
for your site.
You will be asked to login with your File
Transfer Protocol (FTP) account. Once a connection has been
established, you have to copy your website files into the
root of your website, this is a folder normally named ‘public_html’
under Linux hosting or ‘httpdocs’ if you are on
Windows hosting.
Once the files have been copied, all you
need to do is open a fresh browser window, type your domain
into the address bar and your website appears.
Promoting Your Website
You have got your website completed and on
the web now. The next thing to do is to get your website promoted
so that you can start receiving visitors. You can submit your
website online directories under a category that fits your
website and sign up to online advertising services so that
your website will be advertised on other websites.
You should also make sure that your website
is listed in the results of popular search engines such as
MSN, Google, and Yahoo. This will ensure that your website
receives visitors.
Basics of Domain
● Domain Names
A domain name is a bunch of letters, numbers
and hyphens that make up the domain name, like www.creativewebsols.com.
Our domain name address that points to our homepage.
The extension on our domain name is quite self-explanatory
(.com). There are many domain name extensions around the globe.
There are many global top level domains such as .net and .org
which can be technically registered by anyone as it is global
and not owned by a specific country.
In-fact there are many other domain extensions
such as .gov (which obviously can only be registered by governmental
agencies) and .edu (for educational institutes).
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) is responsible for the global coordination
of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers.
Every domain name has atleast one Internet
Protocol (IP). Internet Protocol (IP) consists of numbers
separated by periods; for example IP address of the creativewebsols
is 82.98.762.45.
● Choosing a reliable web registrar
Choosing a registrar to buy your domains
from is not as easy as it may seem. You want to buy domains
from a company that provides responsive support via e-mail,
because at any time there could be a serious problem which
you may need to contact your registrar about. You may want
to take use of some registrar review sites to see other consumer
reviews about the domain registrar you are considering.
● Choosing the right domain
name
Choosing your desired domain name and its
extension is also quite important. Try and make the domain
name relate to your Website. You should make the domain name
more expectant. The best way is to have the name of your website
as the domain name.
● Choosing the right domain
name extension
A domain extension is for example .com, .org,
.edu, .gov, .co.in etc. Now two letter worded domains can’t
be registered unless you are a resident of that specific country.
The most well known and used domain extensions
are .com and .net.
.com is usually for commercial sites
.net for Internet related sites.
.org is usually registered for non-profit charitable organizations.
.gov is for the government sites
● Learn about name servers
Name servers usually look like ns1.domainname.com
and ns2.domainname.com and they point to your domain name.
Your Web host assigns you your name servers, and then it’s
your job to assign them from your domain registrar’s
control panel. |
