In this introductory article on how to build your own website, I’ll give you a brief explanation of the general process for getting your website online and highlight some of the different methods available to you.
HTML – Bare Bones
All websites are written in a simple programming language called html, although to put your website online you don’t need to have any knowledge of this. There are software programs available known as html editors that allow you to create your web page in the same way that you would produce a text document or presentation using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. This gives you a graphical representation and allows you to easily create the web page as you would see it online. I’ll explain a bit more about these and review a couple of the more popular editing programs a bit later.
Web hosting: upload your pages
Once you have written your web pages, you need to upload them to a web server where anyone can access them at any time. Web hosting companies will rent you space on their web server for your pages and associate your domain name (if you have one). Most likely, the method used to upload your web pages to the server is through a method known as FTP (file transfer protocol). Most of the popular html editing programs have built-in FTP so you can upload your newly created and edited html web page files to your web server.
domain names
The domain name is ‘yourcompany.com’ which people will type to view your web pages. It is not strictly necessary to have a domain name as there are companies that offer you the use of their own domains… for example tuisp.com/yourcompany/ where you can host your web pages. You pay an annual fee to a domain name company for the use of your domain name. The domain name can be hosted on any server you want and must be under your full control. You don’t need to buy your domain name from the same company that offers you web hosting, although they often offer good packages that include the domain name of your choice.
Web templates
If you don’t have time to design and format your own web page, you can purchase one of the many website templates available on the Internet. The template is just the basic outlay of your pages, including a common navigation menu, header, and footer, so all you need to do, once set up, is fill in the content for each page. Templates come in a few different formats and are usually labeled with the editing program for which they are compatible. One popular format is Photoshop’s .psd format. These are layered image files where you will be able to separate each part of the image and insert it into your html page.
HTML editing software
There are many html editors available, but there are a few that stand out and have become what one might consider industry standard. Adobe’s Dreamweaver is the great-great-grandfather of them all and is extremely complete. It is designed for managing multiple multi-page websites, allows for easy use of templates, and has a built-in ftp feature that synchronizes web pages on your computer with those on your web server. Dreamweaver is the choice of most professionals and is very comprehensive. However, it is a bit confusing at first and has quite a steep learning curve. There are some books and video products available that really help flatten that steep learning curve and make it easy to build your own websites with little to no experience in a matter of hours. To learn more about these books, check out our blog on building a website.
Another popular web editing program is Xsite pro. It has a very user-friendly interface and has its own template format. The software comes with hundreds of ready-to-use templates that you can use as-is or as a starting point for your own custom version. You can also start from scratch and use your own design if you want. However, the main feature of this editor is its built-in SEO features. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and the software includes an SEO analyzer that will count the occurrences of your keywords and give you reports on all your pages on how well they are optimized for search engines. This is a very simple program to use, but when it comes to fully customizing your work, since you need to stay within the confines of the format, you can be inflexible. More information about this program is in our how to make your own website Blog.
