Websites
are the building blocks of the Internet. But while you might have been tempted
to make one for a while, you may have been wondering how to get one live. Thankfully, the basic setup process is
straightforward. Even with absolutely no knowledge of code you can set one up,
and initial costs could be as low as £20 a year.
Website builder
services
You’ll
often see website builder adverts from companies like GoDaddy or Wix. While
these can be useful to get something up and running, they usually come with
strings attached. By using these services, you can become too wedded to one
provider, and they are likely to have less flexibility over the long term.
Also, they are comparatively expensive when setting up a domain and running
hosting yourself. The initial savings could be in the hundreds of pounds a
year.
The 3 essentials of
building a website
All
you need to set up a website is a domain name, hosting and then some
information. You don’t initially need to worry about code and a nice design to
start with. Once you’ve got something online, you’ll need a template or some
coding and design to make it look good - but that’s for later.
1. Domain name
You
can register a domain with a company like 1 & 1, 123-reg or GoDaddy - and
there are many more. If your domain name is available, then there isn’t any
great requirement to shop around. You can likely get a .co.uk domain name for a
little under £10 and a .com for slightly over that. When you register the
domain, you’ll need to enter some information about yourself as the owner. If
your domain name isn’t available, then you will need to acquire it from its
current owner. You’ll find that a lot of domains are already taken.
Domain
acquisition is often very expensive compared to registering an available one,
and would very rarely be worth the price unless it is critical to your brand or
marketing strategy. If you’re setting up a website for the first time and
aren’t looking to build a business out of your presence, it’s strongly
recommended you just search for a domain name variation that is available. If
you really have to get the specific domain, you’ll need to find the owner on
whois.net and possibly contact them through the details listed there.
Alternatively you could buy a domain from an auction site like sedo.com. Again,
this could get very expensive compared with registering your own.
2. Hosting
Once
you’ve got your domain, you need server space to host your website on. Think of
this as like the space on your phone or computer where you need to store
information. Hosting does come in quite a few shapes and sizes, and you’ll see
that many of the companies selling domain names also allow web hosting. It can
be efficient to have your domain name and hosting by the same company, but you
don’t have to - it just adds a little bit of complexity to your website setup
if you don't. If you don’t setup domain and hosting with the same provider, you
will need to point the domain to a different nameserver. The hosting company
will have the address of the nameserver that you need to point the domain to.
Unless
you’re launching a professional operation, you probably don’t need a large web
hosting package. However, it still pays to shop around because prices can
differ. Economy packages can be as low as £2.99 a month (GoDaddy offer this),
and you shouldn’t need to go above £30 a year for a basic website. At least
1 GB of disk space is recommended in a basic package. You’ll also see
one of the setup criteria being ‘MySQL database’ - it’s worth getting a package
that can run one of these. They aren’t completely essential for a website that
is just a small number of flat HTML pages, but if you want to do anything like
blogging or run a forum, they are essential. Without one, you won’t be able to
install a platform like WordPress, which is a very user friendly publishing
platform.
3. Uploading
information
If
you’ve setup hosting with your domain name provider, you’ll get access to
cPanel. Here you need to setup an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) account - this
is essentially a key to get into your website via an FTP client. There are
quite a few options for an FTP client, including one that is likely to be
provided in your website’s cPanel. However, Filezilla is free and a
straightforward application to use, and separate from web browser. Download it,
enter your login details, and you’ll be able to access your website’s folder
structure. You’ll normally have to navigate to a particular folder to begin
uploading. It shouldn’t be very far from the root. Once you're in, you can
begin uploading. For the most basic of options, open a text file in Notepad and
type in 'Hello world' at the top. Save the file as index.html on your desktop,
then drag and drop this into your file structure. The file will upload. Then go
to your domain in your web browser - you should now see a white page that says
Hello world in the very top left hand corner of the window.
That’s
it - you’ve built your first website!
Of
course, there is a lot more to do to build a fully-fledged website with
numerous web pages and images. You can create folders in your root, which give
URLs their /structure/ and then place files within these folders. It would also
help a lot to know HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) at this stage, so you can
better structure information on the web. These would have to be separate
tutorials. Now you’ve got your website up and running, it’s a great option to
explore how to install WordPress, so you can get a content management system
and publish to the web.
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