I have recently been asked quite a few times, “How do you start your own website?”
The first and most important, is to find a domain name that you want, and is still available. This can be done in quite a few places but before you even begin looking you need to decide what extension you want your site to have. .com? .net? .org? etc. Often the choice of the extension is due to the fact that the .com might not be available, but the .org or .net might be. If can be a concern for some, as people might ‘piggy back’ off of your name and branding.
Often it’s not a matter of which one you would like but which domain name can your register ALL of them for. This is a little more tricky as so many domain names are already taken.
The first step is to write down domains names that appeal to you, and decide if which extension you are looking for, and then begin the hunt. The site I use for looking for availability is http://whois.net it’s a quick and easy site to use and gives you the results immediately.
Secondly, once you have found a domain name you would like and it is available, you want to find a hosting company that will host your site. DON’T register your domain name just yet as most hosting companies will include a domain name in the package for free.
I have been with my hosting company – ‘Imhosted’ – since 2004 and so far have been impressed with their offerings and their service. For less than $10 a month – cheaper if you pay for longer time periods -you will get unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, unlimited domain names associated with your account so you can run multiple different website, unlimited e-mails accounts, ftp accounts, SQL databases etc. They also have a very easy to use interface called ‘cpanel’ and they support a large amount of self installing applications like WordPress.
It should not take more than about 5 minutes to set up the account and get your domain name, then about 48 hours for your domain name to register and replicate worldwide, and your site is ready for you to start publishing information.
Apart from learning how to code in php, css, html etc. The quickest way to get a site onto the web is using applications like WordPress. http://wordpress.org
