Before diving into the world of website design, it is worth giving some consideration to what the purpose of your website will be. What you want your website to do for you will have some bearing on the kind of options open to you for creating it. What I mean is that if you only want a site in order to get certain information online and then tell people you already know where they can find it, there are fewer things to consider compared to the need for your site to attract large numbers of new visitors through search engines.
Apart from simple sites for families or friends, the need to show up in search engines and attract new visitors is usually the requirement for most websites, and certainly for business websites. Getting a few pages of information onto the web is one thing, but getting information online in a way that it will show up on search engines and be found by lots of visitors is something else. This 'something else' is known as search engine optimization (SEO) and is a separate, huge subject, but you need to at least be aware of it before starting on a website.
However you choose to create your website, there will be three initial stages to getting it up and running. First, you need to have your own domain name. This is a unique address on the internet where people can find your website. Next, you need a web hosting company to host your website for you. All websites are stored on computers by companies known as web hosts, and they provide a service which allows visitors to your site to download and view your pages and files at any time of day of night. This typically will cost a few dollars a month, and often includes a domain name in the package. Finally, you need to create the actual web pages themselves, which is the website design stage.
The way these three aspects interlink to give you your website is as follows: You create your web pages and upload them to the server of your web host. Your pages are now stored on the hard drive of the host's computers. When you have registered your domain name, you then tell your domain registrar to point the domain at the address of your web host's server, where your website is stored. So that anyone typing in your domain name will then be directed to your web host, where they will see your web pages.
Registering a domain name is extremely quick and simple and can be done with any one of thousands of domain name registrars. Finding a web host is easy enough, in so far as there is no shortage of them, though great care must be taken to find a reliable one, as well as one that offers a good value hosting deal. It is best to check recommendations and reviews carefully before signing up with a host. Of the three things involved in creating a website, it is the website design part that can be a bit more involved.
Clearly there are many experienced website designers who will charge you to design your site for you. Unless you are an existing successful business with money to spare for such things, this is unlikely to be an option, so you will need to find a way of doing this yourself. One option is to spend a long time learning the language of web design (hyper text markup language, cascading style sheets, etc) and do it from scratch. Most people simply do not have the time to invest in all that would involve, which leads us to web design tools that do not require any technical knowledge.
There are various website design tools available which are aimed at people who do not want to have to get into any strange languages or technical stuff. This type of tool is known as 'what you see is what you get', or WYSIWYG. My only advice in this respect would be to check reviews and avoid any free ones, which are notorious for creating awful code which will give you problems later on. A basic design tool is not going to give you any guidance in terms of how you should create your site to rank well in search engines, so you need to find out more about SEO before you start on your design.
There are some software packages available for creating websites or blogs which include absolutely everything you need to build a successful site, including hosting and search engine optimization functions. The best of these are not just about web design, but about building a site in the right way from the start, so that it will definitely attract visitors. These can be useful for the beginner as they offer a step by step approach which effectively holds your hand throughout the whole process. Take care to select an option which offers help and support whenever you need it, because you will definitely have questions, and without support it can be very hard to find the answers.
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