The first task in building a website is to identify a purpose for your website.
Purposes include:

• To sell products (e-commerce)
• To provide information
• To promote an event
• To create a “home” on the web with a personal web page or blog
• To provide a service to the public
• To entertain

Your website’s purpose may even be a combination of the above; whatever the purpose may be, it is vital to identify the purpose of your website.  You can sell products online provided you have the supply for the demand, you can create an informational website over any topic that interests you and make money through ads, or you can create the next million dollar website with that brilliant idea you have.  After the basic purpose of your website has been solidified, you may then proceed to the next steps.

What will the name of your website be?

What will the name of your website be?  Use a website similar to GoDaddy.com and use it to see if the domain name you have in mind is available.  Your first few ideas will most likely already be taken by someone else.  It can be extremely frustrating when you just cant get a domain name you really like because it is already owned by someone else. When I get stumped while trying to come up with the perfect domain name, I use BustAName.

BustAName is an extremely helpful tool to help you come up with a domain name.  Just enter the basic words you would like to see in your domain name, and let the tool combine words for you.  You can also select synonyms of a word and conduct your own experiments.

Next, you must register the domain name.

Register your domain name with a domain registrar such as GoDaddy.  There are several other domain registrars out there offering low prices, but I recommend using GoDaddy because of their wonderful customer support.

Now you must choose a web hosting service.

Go ahead and type “web hosting services” into Google and see how many results you get. There are so many web hosting services out there offering very reasonable pricing. The first website that I created was made using Yahoo Merchant Solutions. I wanted to create a website for the family business and Yahoo seemed like it was offering a more premium deal compared to other companies. After using Yahoo’s service for a few months, while I was researching intensely about web design and selling products online, I quickly found that Yahoo limited me from advancing in several areas.
I then found that I could find notably cheaper hosting services that did not force me to use their web design software to create my website(The web based software that Yahoo forced me to use is what limited my advancement).

Most web hosting services offer unlimited everything for a low monthly price ranging from about $3 to $10 a month(compared to Yahoo’s $30 a month). What I mean by “everything” is unlimited disk space and bandwidth, as well as a 99% uptime guarantee. After using JustHost for my web hosting service for about a year, I stumbled upon another limitation. The ‘catch’ that mostly every hosting company does not tell you about is that you are always limited on your “Inodes.” Inodes are the files and images that make up your website; each file and each image uploaded to your website are equal to one inode each. JustHost sent me a message telling me that they will shut my account down if I do not reduce my inodes to at least the maximum amount allowed(I had about 85,000 inodes while the limit was 50,000).

After extensive research, I found one of the very few companies that actually disclose their inode limitations. I had all of my files and images and account information transferred to my new hosting service with HostGator. Hostgator allows you to use up to 250,000 inodes on one account!

I recommend using HostGator as your web hosting service for your first website to avoid any hassle later.

How to actually build the website.

Building your website depends on the purpose of the website.  If your website is strictly an informational website that you intend to earn money through ads with, then you should use a free HTML and/or CSS template that you can find all over the internet.  You can even purchase a premium web template from a website such as Template Monster.  If you are trying to sell products online, you would need to find a shopping cart software that will satisfy your specifications.  The shopping cart software that I have found to be the most bang for your buck is CS-Cart.  I use it for my flags website and my sequin costumes website, easy to use and very comprehensive. Any other website scripts or templates can be found online at websites like hotscripts.com and scriptcopy.com.

You will need to familiarize yourself with HTML, CSS, and/or PHP. These are the languages that are used to make up the websites and you will need to learn how to manipulate the languages in order to make the website look the way you want it to look. Until you learn more about the web languages, the templates will look good enough by themselves in the meantime.

You will also need to download FileZilla. Filezilla is a free software that allows you to upload the files of the templates and images to your website’s server.

Research

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