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Build your home on the web today
1 : If you have any kind of business then sooner or later you will need a web presence in order to boost your business and to offer your services to people from all over the world .
2: Lets suppose you work for a company and that company asked you to make a website for them or make one for boosting business and communicating well with your co-workers.
3: Maybe you go to school and your school asked you to make one for them or for their journal or maybe you want to make one for your favorite movies etc .
So like I said there are millions of reasons but those three are some of the main ones. Today in this article I will try to explain all you need to build your home on the web today . Believe it or not within 24-hours you could have a website up and running .Lets get started then .
What are url , website, servers, intranet, internet, http,www and domain names, WYSIWYG?
You might already know the basics and the answers of the above questions but I will still write up a short introduction and answers to them so if you don't know it can then get you started.
Url : stands for Uniform Resource Locator and it tells the web browser what to do and where to go when you type it into the address bar of your web browser.
Website: is a location on the world wide web(www) and has a start page or home page which is the first thing you see when you visit it.It contains many files and owned by an individual or organization. And today you are going to make one :)
Servers : are like the normal computers but they have a lot of disk space and are connected to the internet 24-hours a day , 7 days a week, 365 days, a year . Servers serve data such as web pages , pictures , applications and run many different types of programs in order to handle many different types of files.
Intranet : is more like the internet but restricted to a certain organization .Organizations exchange information easily using intranets. They can do anything that can be done on the internet like participating in discussion groups, viewing documents and revising them etc.
Internet :is a global network which is connected to millions of computers and it is not owned or run by a special company and it has vast collection of resources, information.
HTTP: stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and is a set of standards and tell the servers how to handle web pages , for example when you type a url into the address bar it then tells the domain name which you typed to serve(display) a web page .
www: stands for World Wide Web and is a system of internet servers that support documents formatted in special way. Documents are formatted in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) which can link to other documents,audio and multimedia and graphics.
Domain Name : is the name of the server hosting the website . There are many different types of domain names such us .com for commercial , .net for networks and ISPs(Internet Service Providers) ,.gov for government sites , .edu for educational institutes and .org for non-profit organizations . The most widely used one is the .com one.
WYSIWYG: stands for what you see is what you get and applications which have WYSIWYG enable you to see what is displayed on the screen exactly when you print the document or publish it. There are many WYSIWYG editors which enable you to easily create a website and the best and most popular ones include Microsoft® FrontPage® and Macromedia® Dreamweaver® MX . If you know how to use Microsoft® Word® then you can use those two because they are more alike .
That was a short explanation of some of the things you will need to know when you want to build your website . But you can search the internet and get more information and definitions about what is covered in here and what is not .
Prepare your site files.
Most of the time when I make a website for a client or a friend they don't bring everything that is needed to get the website up and running. It is better it prepare all the files which you will use for your site in a specific folder in your personal computer. Prepare all the files you need before you start making your website.
Plan the Concept of your Site
That is right. You need to plan the concept of your site before you go into designing it. You can make a sketch of how it will look and then try to implement that .When making the concept your site it is better to use real text that will appear on the site so that will help you a lot .
Start Designing Your Site using WYSIWYG editor.
Now that you have prepared and planed the concept of your site then it is time to start designing it .You can use any WYSIWYG editor to design it.If you don't want to start designing it but you want something ready that you can change the text then you can buy a professional template which will cost you like $10-$30 .
Also there are many free templates which you can use . Just make a search in Google™ and you will get millions of sites for downloading free site templates .
Shop for hosting and domain name
Now that you have built your site and it is on your personal computer then you will need to rent a remote server and get a domain name so it can be accessible to all people from the world. Before you start shopping for hosting you have to make a list of what you want like special features, bandwidth , storage space etc. If you are building a small personal website then I guess 50 mb space and 1-5 Gigabyte of data transfer . Of course you can later upgrade to a bigger plan.
Also hosting companies many other features along with space and bandwidth such as control panel where you can manage your website easily .If you don't want to get a professional hosting or you can afford it then you can get free hosting which some companies offer and is ad supported and has a lot of restrictions.
Also you will need to register a domain name for your site . Domain names cost from $6.00 to $35 yearly . There are many great domain registrars which you can use to register your domain name. If you don't to register a domain name then you get a sub domain but you will have to make sure that your hosting company can offer you a sub domain which will be like the following your-site-name.hosting-company-site.com When you register your domain name you will have to wait 24-48 hours before it can be fully working . But before that you can still upload your site files because your hosting company will give you an IP which you can use for uploading your site files.
Conclusion
There you have it. Just follow them well and You could be running your own website within 24 hours. Of course this was a short article but at least it provides you some of the basic information you need to know. Also you can visit many sites online which can provide you a more detailed tutorials and website enhancements. Until next time, try to build your home on the web today and good luck .
About the Author
Abdillahi Abdillahi is a web designer, founder and president of http://kooshin.com , a company providing affordable web hosting and web design solutions to small to medium sized businesses and individuals. For more information , please visit http://kooshin.com