It’s a grand and wonderful dream to have your own website online. Perhaps you yearn to kick your business up to the next level, look established in the eyes of customers, and disseminate information easily without having to pick up the phone. Or perhaps you have a great organization that has to get the word out or just want to put up a personal site to tell the world what you’ve been up to. So where to start? I’m going to give you the big picture broken down into basic steps to get your website online.
- Choose and purchase a domain name – There’s a lot to choosing the correct domain name. This should be done before you even start creating your site. See my Secrets of Choosing a Domain Name.
- Find Hosting – Your website will consist of files and images that will be called up when your visitors come to your site. The files have to reside somewhere, basically on servers or giant versions of your home computer. Web hosting is basically paying a monthly fee to have those files stored on someone’s servers so that your visitors can see the files and images when they get to your site. Finding good web hosting is a challenge, especially for someone new to the game. Read my reviews of my two favorite hosting companies.
- Create Your Website – If you are a do-it-your-selfer, you can learn HTML and CSS to create a site. There are also What You See Is What You Get (WYSWYG) programs that will help you create your site without knowing a ton of code, but you will still need to know some basics. You can also find sites on the web that allow you to choose a website template and customize it, without knowing anything about web design. The most costly option, but one that will generate the best results, is to find a local web design firm to create your site.
- Upload Your Site – After your site is created, the files must be uploaded to your web host. This is usually done through an File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program. My favorite is FileZilla, a free FTP program.
Once your site goes live, you may have visions of hundreds or thousands of visitors each day. However, one important thing to know is that if you build it, they will not come. You have to work very hard to get visitors to come to your site, but that is a huge topic for another day.
My next post in this series covers the Secrets to Choosing a Domain Name.
