How to Create a Website
Need to
establish an online presence for yourself or your business but have no idea
where to start? This primer will teach you how to create a website—small or
large—in no time flat.
head of
a multinational corporation who employs thousands of people or a local
mom-and-pop shop from around the way, you need a website to help potential
customers find you online. If you have a business, failure to establish an
online home is lost revenue. You don't want that. Fortunately, there is
a vast number of web hosting services at your disposal. Choosing one
is the tricky part, as it depends both on the quality of the service and its
ability to match your needs. The Best Web Hosting Services is an excellent place to start, as it highlights our 10
favorite web hostsAs far as actually doing the nuts and bolts building
and design of your site, you also have plenty of options. You can hire someone
to design and code a website, or you can try your own hand (if you're a novice, The Best Courses for
Learning How to Build Websites is an excellent starting point).
You can use an online service to create web pages, or build it offline using a
desktop software tool. Or, if you're a coding dynamo, use a plain text editor
to create a site from scratch. How you mix and match these decisions depends on
your skills, time, budget, and gumption.
If you're ready to get going, this guide will
introduce you to the services and software that can get you started building
your own website, even if you have no experience. Keep in mind, none of these
tools will give you an idea for a winning website—that's on you. They also
won't make you a web designer, a job that's distinct
from building a site. Still, these services and software will ease some of the
headaches that come from a lack of extensive expertise in CSS, FTP, HTML, and
PHP. Let's get started.
Blogging For Fun and Profit
A blog, a shortening of the
antiquated-on-arrival word "weblog," is a unique website subset that
you may recognize from its familiar layout. Typically, new content resides at
top of the page and older posts are revealed as your scroll down. If you need
to quickly build a simple website, starting with a blogging service is a great
way to go.
The major player in the blog game
is WordPress, a content management system (CMS) that powers millions of
websites, including The New York Times, Quartz, and Variety. WordPress-powered
sites are incredibly easy to set up, customize, and update—ideally on a daily
basis. You aren't required to learn fancy-schmancy FTP tricks (though you can
certainly use them if you like), and there are ridiculous numbers of free and
paid WordPress themes and WordPress plug-ins to give your website a
pretty face and vastly expanded functionality. Check out How to Get Started With WordPress to learn
everything you need to know about the CMS, including the differences between
WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Though WordPress dominates the blogging space,
it isn't the only blogging CMS of note.
Yahoo's Tumblr is another incredibly popular blog platform that lends itself to shorter, more visual posts. You can, however, find themes that give your Tumblr site a more traditional website's look and feel. Google's Blogger features tight integration with Google AdSense, so making extra pocket change is a snap. Newer blogging services, such as Anchor, Feather, and Medium, stress writing and publishing more than intricate design, but they're incredibly simple to update.
These
services can host your content on their servers free of charge, but in exchange
for that zero cost, your online destination will have a less-than-elegant
domain, such as jeffreylwilson.tumblr.com. That might be fine for a personal
blog, but it will look too low-rent for a business that wants people to trust
it enough to pay for whatever it's selling.
If you prefer a more traditional URL, you'll
need to purchase one from the likes of GoDaddy or
Namecheap. Domain name pricing can range from extremely cheap to extremely
expensive, depending on whether or not domain squatters are looking to flip a
valuable piece of online real estate. You'll want to get something short, but
evocative and catchy. For more, please read How to Register a Domain
Name.
Depending on the hosting service, you may need
to download the CMS and upload it to your own hosted platform if you wish to
use a domain you purchased elsewhere.
If you're concerned about how your site will
look on mobile devices, don't fret. Sites created on these blogging platforms
typically include mobile-friendly responsive design versions, so that they're
well formatted for smartphones and tablets.
Build Your
Personal Online #Brand
Blogs are swell, but sometimes you need a
simple place to park your persona on the internet for branding purposes. In
this case, you can just get a nameplate site, or as we prefer to think of them,
a personal webpage (rather than a multipage site). Instead of linking
internally to your store or other pages of note as you would with a more
traditional web page, a personal site usually has links that go elsewhere—to
your social networks, wish lists, playlists, or whatever else is linkable.
About.me is an example of a nameplate service.
You simply upload one big photograph as the background for your personal
webpage, then artfully overlay information and links to create your digital
nameplate. These free sites help you pull images from your social networks or
from a hard drive, then provide the tools to make the text and links work
unobtrusively, though it really behooves you to check out other personal pages
for an idea of what works.
These services typically offer a premium tier
that grants more hosting flexibility. For example, About.me's $8 per month
premium package removes the company's branding and gives you the ability to
connect your site to an externally purchased domain.
Artists with
major portfolios to show off shouldn't feel left out. There are a number of
personal page/site builders, including BigBlackBag and SmugMug, that display
your work just as well, or better, than Flickr or Instagram can. Stepping Up to Self-Hosted
Services
When it's time to go beyond the blogs, beyond
the online resumes, beyond the page of links, which service do you turn to for
a full-blown site that gives you the flexibility to build nearly anything you
desire? There's no lack of them, but three of our favorites are DreamHost, HostGator, and Hostwinds, well-rounded
services that feature numerous hosting types and tiers.
You can
get started for roughly $10 per month for shared or
WordPress hosting if your website doesn't require much server horsepower. As
your business expands, however, your website may need greater horsepower.
That's when you should look into cloud, VPS, and dedicated hosting.
These levels of services are for when you really need a web host that offers
lots of storage, a significant amount of month data transfers, and numerous
email accounts.
See How We Test Web Hosting
Services
Even if you don't sign up for those web hosts,
you should look for services that offer similar features. You'll want a WYSIWYG
editor that lets you adjust every page and add images, video, and social links.
Plunking down a few extra bucks typically nets you robust ecommerce and search
engine optimization (SEO) packages for improved Bing, Google, and Yahoo
placement. Most advanced web hosting services include at least one domain name,
free of charge, when you sign up.
How to Build an Ecommerce
Website
Before we move on, we should discuss integrating ecommerce into
your website. If you plan to sell a product or service, this is an essential
part of the website building process that cannot be ignored. Thankfully, most
web hosting services offer a variety of different bundled software and
integrations.
Things to
look for as you vet hosts for ecommerce include drag-and-drop store builders, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) software for safeguarding financial
transactions, and email marketing plug-ins, so that you don't have to work
with an outside vendor to promote your business. There's nothing wrong per se
with using an unconnected marketing service, but anything that adds convenience
means more time to spend on the rest of your business. For more in-depth advice
on getting started selling online, you should consider our story on the 6 Factors Companies Need to Consider When Choosing a Web Host. Website
Builders Build Websites
There's another relatively fast way to get your
website online: website builders.
These are standalone services featuring drag-and-drop tools and templates that
let nonexpert, would-be webmasters get up and running quickly. Some advanced
web hosts also offer their own sitebuilders or integrate functionality from one
of the standalone services.
While
the best of them offer surprising amounts of flexibility, they also impose
stringent enough restrictions to page design that you shouldn't be able to
create a really bad looking site using one of these services. Typically you can
get a Mysite.servicename.com style-url with no commerce abilities for free from
one of these services; you have to pay extra for a better URL and the ability
to sell. One issue to consider is that if you eventually outgrow one of these
services, it can be hard to export your site to a full scale advanced web
hosting like Dreamhost or Hostgator. If you know that's where you are
eventually going, it may be better to skip the sitebuilder step.
None gets the job done better Editors' Choice
award-winning Wix, though Gator
and GoDaddy have very compelling offerings. It has a drag-and-drop interface,
and all elements of the site are customizable. It doesn't cost a cent to get
started with Wix, but you'll want to go premium, starting at $5 per month for a
domain and scaling upward to $25 per month for unlimited monthly data transfers
and 20GB of storage.
DIY: Website Creation Software
For years Adobe Dreamweaver has
been synonymous with web page creation. It's gone from being a creator of HTML
pages in a WYSIWYG interface to being able to handle programming pages in Cold
Fusion, JavaScript, PHP, and other formats. Its liquid layout lets you see how
pages look at different browser and screen sizes—even on smartphones and
tablets. It's about as code-heavy as you want it to be.
Dreamweaver
is available as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription service. You can
get a standalone version of Dreamweaver CC for $31.49 per month, or as part of
Adobe's All Apps suite, which includes Illustrator CC and Photoshop CC,
starting at $79.49 per month.
If you're on a Mac, however, there's another
option: RapidWeaver. This WYSIWYG webpage editor has full code access and FTP
support for uploading pages. There are plenty of built-in templates to get
started, all for the one-time price of $84.99. On Windows there are numerous
choices. Xara Web Designer, for example, starts at $49.99 and promises you don't
need to know HTML or Javascript to create sites based on the company's
templates.
Press
Publish
Sure, there are more advanced hosting topics to
consider, such as domain name servers and multi-cloud connectivity, but this
guide is meant to introduce you to the basics. Whether you decide to build a
website yourself or hire coding experts to do the dirty work is up to you. For
now, rest easy knowing you have the information to get started in taking your
business online.
For further reading on getting the
most out of your business website, check out 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to Boost Traffic to Your Website, Building an E-Commerce Website: 8 Technical Aspects You Need to Understand, Processing Payments on the Web: 7 Things to Consider, and 6 Surefire Ways to Market Your New E-Commerce Website.