You want to create a real website, but you don't know where to begin? Just follow these steps!
A website is made of a set of webpages hosted on a server. Every webpage can be accessed throught its URL, and all the URLs on a same website begin with the website's domain name.
Example: http://www.yourdomain.com
So the first thing you have to do is to register a domain name for your website. You can do it throught these websites:http://www.godaddy.com/
http://www.netfirms.com/
http://www.dynadot.com/
Chose an available domain and register it. It costs around $10/year.
If you don't want to spend a penny, you can get a free subdomain at http://www.uni.cc/
Your website's address will then look like: http://yourwebsite.uni.cc/
Now you have a domain name, you need a webhost, it a "place" where you will upload your webpages and the associated files.
You can use either free hosts or paid hosts.
Here are some free hosts:
http://byethost.com/
http://110mb.com/
Paid hosts:
http://hostgator.com/
GoDaddy webhosting
How do I link my domain name to my host?
Go to your hosting account, and retrieve the nameservers of your host, they may look like:
ns1.yourhost.com
ns2.yourhost.com
...
If you can't find them use the help or look at the FAQs or the forum.
Once done, enter in your domain account and add these nameservers to your domain.
Go back to your hosting account: At the "Domains" section of your panel, select "Addon domains", and add your domain (example: mydomain.com or mydomain.net, without "www").
At the "CNAME" section, add "www" as a CNAME.
Your domain won't work immediatly, the DNS propagation process can take up to 76 hours.
This is the end of the first step: Your future website has an address and a host.
Now it's time to buil up your site...
Let's start by downloading some softwares:
Code editor: To edit your webpages and your scripts.
Free code editor: http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/
You can also buy Adobe CS4 with Adobe Dreamweaver.
FTP Client: To upload your files to the server: http://coreftp.com/
You may also need a graphic editor like Adobe Photoshop or Copyscape.
Allthing's alright?
If you want to build a professional looking website, you need to have a complete control over your site content. This can be achieved only throught learning some coding languages:
HTML: The "bodywork" of any webpage.
CSS: For design elements.
HTML and CSS are enough to create a small static website, but some important functionalities are provided throught these following programming languages:
PHP: Used for creating dynamic websites.
Javascript: Useful if you want some interactivity for your website.
You can learn these languages for free at http://www.w3schools.com/
This is rather easy and you can start making your first website in few weeks.
