What are the steps in getting a website online?
The first step in selecting a domain name, is knowing what you want your website to do. These are some of the questions you have to ask yourself. Will I be selling products and survives? Will this website be just a personal website? Will I use this Website to Market affiliate products? Sell advertising?
The next step is selecting a website name.
Selecting and registering a Domain Name
When selecting the name for a website, there a few main area which you need to consider before selecting a name.
Should you create a name for users or search engine?
When selecting a website name, make sure that its one which is really catchy and one which visitors will easily remember in order to visit again or tell others of your website. While adding hyphens in your domain might make it easier for search engine to differentiate keywords in your domain name, you might actually be losing a lot of users this way, as user's don’t really enter a Hyphen when search for a site. Also imagine someone passing on your web address by word of mouth and forgetting to mention the hyphen, this could send them to one of your competitors.
Once you have chosen a suitable name, you will need to register that name. There are many websites on the internet which you can use to order your domain name. This is usually done over 1 or 2 year periods and should cost between £5 - £12 for registering.
Selecting a website Host.
In order for your web pages to be view online or available on the world wide web, the pages will need to be uploaded to a Web Server via a Web hosting Company.
What is a Web Hosting Company?
These are companies which provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center.
Type of Web Hosting Packages
Web Hosts provide different hosting packages option which you can choose from. These are normally a 12 month contract to host your website and prices vary depending on what package you decide to choose. These options usually comes with other software and provide support for various database applications and application development such as, PHP, JAVA, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, and ASP.NET. However there are also many free Heb Hosts providers on the internet, where you don’t have to pay. The downside to this is that they will place their own add banner on your website, this option is not advisable if the site will be used for anything other than a personal website because this would not look professional to customersUploading Your Website
Once you have selected the web hosting package that best suites your need, you will then be sent your login details for your account to the email address which you registered with. This will contain all the details you will need to upload files to your website .Softwares to upload, build and manage your web site.
There are various software packages available either free or which requires you to buy a license for it. You will then use your application to upload your website pages to your Web Host servers, which will then allow your website to be seen on the WWW. Here is a brief descriptions of some of the best know applications which are used today.
Dreamweaver - This is my personal pick of the lot, it very easy to use, even for a beginner. This is now known as Adobe Dreamweaver (formerly Macromedia Dreamweaver) is a web development application originally created by Macromedia, and is now developed by Adobe Systems, which acquired Macromedia in 2005. You can use it to create web pages and also FTP your finished pages to your web server. Dreamweaver also contains many features which will allow you to create complicated web systems with the click of a few buttons. One example of this is a login system. The code for this is already inbuilt in Dreamweaver, so to create a login page, this can be achieved with just a few clicks.
CuteFTP - This is used to transfer files between computers and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers to publish web pages, download digital images, music, multi-media files and software, and transfer files of any size or type between home and office. CuteFTP is a series of FTP (file transfer) client applications developed by GlobalSCAPE since 1996, with both a Windows-based or Mac-based interface and made for both home and professional use. CuteFTP is used to transfer files between computers and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers to publish web pages, download digital images, music, multi-media files and software, and transfer files of any size or type between home and office. Since 1999, CuteFTP Pro and CuteFTP Mac Pro have also been available alongside CuteFTP Home with free trial periods. These are the different versions of CuteFTP which are available: CuteFTP Pro, CuteFTP Mac Pro, CuteFTP Home with free trial periods.
CoffeeCup - This is suitable for both Web-design newbies and HTML Pro, the latest version introduces a new CSS and HTML autocompletion tool to join its well-known WYSIWYG and standard HTML editors. It contains advanced for HTML and CSS scripting, Flash animations, and drag-and-drop Java scripts. Beginners tutorial and a WYSIWYG editor that supports simple drag-and-drop.
And that's my simple guide to getting a website online.
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