HOW TO MAKE AN INTERACTIVE WEBSITE

How to Start / Create a Website: The Beginner's A-Z Guide


This tutorial shows you how to make or create a website. It is intended for the beginner and layperson, taking you step by step through the whole process from the very beginning. It makes very few assumptions about what you know (other than the fact that you know how to surf the Internet, since you're already reading this article on the Internet).

The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Own Website

  1. Get Your Domain Name

    The first thing you need to do before anything else is to get yourself a domain name. This is the name you want to give to your website. For example, the domain name of the website you're reading is "infotechforit.blogspot.in". To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. Getting a name does not get you a website or anything like that. It's just a name. It's sort of like registering a business name in the brick-and-mortar world; having that business name does not mean that you also have the shop premises to go with it.
    • Detailed information on getting a good domain name can be found in the article Tips on Choosing a Good Domain Name.
    • After you read that, you will need to know the steps to registering a domain name and the things you need to look out for when registering. You can find a detailed guide in the article How to Register a Domain Name.
    • It may also be wise to take a look at some of the Important Precautions to Take When Buying a Domain Name, just so that you don't commit the same mistakes that some newcomers make when buying a domain name.
  2. Choose a Web Host and Sign Up for an Account

    A web host is basically a company that has many computers connected to the Internet. When you place your web pages on their computers, everyone in the world will be able to connect to it and view them. You will need to sign up for an account with a web host so that your website has a home. If getting a domain name is analogous to getting a business name in the brick-and-mortar world, getting a web hosting account is comparable to renting office or shop premises for your business.
    • There are many issues involved in finding a good web host. Read up on the various things you need to look for in the article How to Choose a Web Host.
    • When you have an idea of what to look for, you can search for one from the Budget Web Hosting page. You can also find out which web host I'm currently using from the Which Web Host Do You Recommend? page.
    After you sign up for a web hosting account, you will need to point your domain to that account on your web host. Information on how to do this can be found in the guide How to Point a Domain Name to Your Website (Or What to Do After Buying Your Domain Name).
  3. Designing your Web Pages

    Once you have settled your domain name and web host, the next step is to design the web site itself. In this article, I will assume that you will be doing this yourself. If you are hiring a web designer to do it for you, you can probably skip this step, since that person will handle it on your behalf.
    • Although there are many considerations in web design, as a beginner, your first step is to actually get something out onto the web. The fine-tuning can come after you've figured out how to publish a basic web page. One way is to use a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") web editor to do it. Such editors allow you to design your site visually, without having to muck around with the technical details. They work just like a normal wordprocessor.
      There are a number of free and commercial web editors around. One free (and open source) editor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux is BlueGriffon. You can find a guide on how to use this editor from my BlueGriffon Tutorial. The guide takes you through the process of designing a website from scratch so that you end up with a fully-functional site, complete with multiple pages and a feedback form. (Instructions on how to get BlueGriffon can be found in that tutorial.) And if none of them suits your taste, there are also numerous other programs listed on infotechforit.blogspot.in Free HTML Editors and WYSIWYG Web Editors page.
    • After you have followed my tutorial, and are on the way to designing your website, you might want to read the article Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility in Web Design as well. It takes a brief look at some of the real world issues that every web designer must deal with.
  4. Testing Your Website

    Although I list this step separately, it should be done throughout your web design cycle. I list it here to give it a little more prominence, since too few new webmasters actually perform it adequately.
    You will need to test your web pages as you design them in the major browsers: ChromeFirefoxSafari and Internet Explorer 11. All these browsers can be obtained free of charge, so it should be no hardship to get them. Unfortunately, directly testing your site is the only way you can be really sure that it works the way you want it to on your visitors' machines. And those with access to Windows 10 should also test with Microsoft Edge, the successor to Internet Explorer. In addition, if you have a smartphone, try out your site there too.
    For those who don't have Windows 10 but need Microsoft Edge, and those who run a Mac (and thus do not have either Edge or Internet Explorer), all is not lost. You can use a piece of software called a virtual machine, which mimics a completely separate computer running within your real computer. Information about this can be found in the article How to Check Your Website with Multiple Browsers on a Single Machine (Cross-Browser Compatibility Checking). Note that although that article speaks about testing with different versions of Internet Explorer, the method mentioned can also be used to obtain and test Edge, since Microsoft makes the latter available free of charge from the same location. And where Internet Explorer is concerned, you probably do not need to get any version other than 11, since most people seem to have upgraded from the older versions (at least on my sites).
    If you want to improve the chances that your website will work in future versions of all web browsers, consider validating the code for your web pages. In layman's language, this means that you should check that the underlying code of your web page, called "HTML" and "CSS", has no syntax errors. You don't actually need technical knowledge of HTML and CSS to validate the page, since you can use one of the numerous free web page validatorsaround to do the hard work. On the other hand, if the validator tells you that your page has errors, it may sometimes be hard to figure out what's wrong (and whether the error is actually a serious one) if you don't have the requisite knowledge. Having said that, some validators actually give concrete suggestions on how to fix your code, and one of them, called "HTML Tidy", is even supposed to be able to fix errors for you.
  5. Getting Your Site Noticed

    When your site is ready, you can submit it to search engines like Google and Bing. Use the links below to do this.
    In general, if your site is already linked to by other websites, you may not even need to submit it to these search engines. They will probably find it themselves by following the links on those websites.
    Apart from submitting your site to the search engine, you may also want to consider promoting it in other ways, such as the usual way people did things before the creation of the Internet: advertisements in the newspapers, word-of-mouth, etc. There are even companies on the Internet, like PRWeb, that can help you create press releases, which may get your site noticed by news sites and blogs.

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