How to build a basic website.
 

In this article I am going to explain all the steps you need to take to setup a simple website for you self. Before we start you will need to make sure you have done the following things:

1. Have Some Money For Domain/Hosting,
2. Find someone to design a website for you,
3. Have some web development software for editing pages etc.

Ok, the first step of setting up a website/blog would be to think of a name. The name of the website should be anything you like. But there are a few things that you have to make sure of before buying one.

1. The domain registrar allows you to manage the domain dns*.
2. The domain you wish to purchase is available, you can check this at the site you with to buy your domain from.
3. Make sure that the domain you are going to buy has something in common with the content you are going to publish. For example, if you buy GamerJuice.co.uk then publish things about pet caring then people will not be able to find your site easy as the name is not relevant to the content.

* Dns stands for ?Domain Name System?. The Domain Name System is the system that translates Internet domain names into IP numbers. A ?DNS Server? is a server that performs this kind of translation.

A few good sites for buying domains would be:

* http://namecheap.com/
* http://123-reg.co.uk /
* http://GoDaddy.com/

These are just a few of the sites that I use. There could be other sites offering better deals but I tend to use these sites as they are well known in the web development world.

So, now you have your domain, now you will need web hosting. Web hosting is simple a computer that is always connected to the Internet that stores all the files from your site and allows a high amount of users to access them at a time. When choosing your web hosting package you will need to make sure it meets the requirements of the scripts that you are going to use on your site. For example, if you are going to set-up a blog like i have here then you will need to make sure that the server is compatible with php and sql. If you are unsure about any of this then please contact the support of the web hosting company that you wish to purchase hosting from.

Another thing you have to look out for is the space, each hosting plan comes with a designated amount of space on a server. If you are going to just have a little site like a blog then you will not need a huge amount of space. But if you are looking to have a bigger site such as a video sharing network like Youtube then you are going to need a lot more space as you will need to be able to store all the videos etc.

Once you have you hosting set-up you will need to point your domain to the server, this is done by changing the DNS settings as i previously explained what they are. This is normally explained in the welcome email from the hosting provider.

Now its time to pick a website. When setting up a website you can choose from a huge veriaty of options. You could choose a premade website such as a template. Or you can choose a premade script such as wordpress. Wordpress is one of the most common and safest scripts for web blogging. But if you are not looking to setup a blog then you will have to look around for some scripts.

For the design part of the website you would need to find someone that does web design and ask them to do you one. This can cost a lot of money depending on the complexity of the design. Alternatively you can look around for some free templates, there are a lot of websites out there that offer very high quality templates.

It?s time to upload your site. To do this you will need an ftp program such as Filezilla. This ftp program is used to upload a large amount of files onto a server at one time. This is used instead of the web method of uploading 1 file individually. This saves time and saves you from loosing files in the process. To connect to your server you will need to know you username and password for you website. First of all you will need to enter you ftp server address into the address bar in the ftp program. This could be a number of things and will most probably be told to you in your web hosting welcome email. Once you have entered your server address you will need to enter your user information for your hosting account.

Ok, so you logged in. Now what you need to do is find the directory on the server that hosts the files that are visible to the public. This is usually called ?Public_html? or ?www?. Once you have done that you will then be able to upload all your site files into that folder. Please be sure to replace the index.html or index.php file as if you do not then you site may not show.

That should be it. Your site should be fully uploaded and ready to go. But if you are using a script such as Word press then please be sure to follow the install instructions in the file you have downloaded from the script publishers website.

Thank you for reading this and I would thank anyone that would care to leave a comment and some feedback

This article is not to be used on any website without my permission. If you would like to use it then please contact me, it will save a lot of hassle for me and you in the future.

Provided By http://gamerjuice.co.uk