Website Building and Hosting - Essential Advice About How to Set Up a Website

It can seem as though everyone has a website these days, but the prospect of building a website of your own can be a daunting one when you are not sure what is involved or how to go about it. Getting a little insight into how much there is that you don't know can be rather off-putting, and it is a vast area, but making a website does not need to be complicated or expensive.   It is worth bearing in mind that although there is an enormous amount of knowledge and information about website design, hosting and development that you will not know about, you do not need to know most of that stuff to get started. Even quite advanced webmasters may not know much about certain areas, but there are tools that can help you achieve things without too much detailed knowledge.   Breaking down the essential requirements for building and hosting a website, the only things you really need are a domain name, a web host and a tool to help you create your site. You can't have your own website unless you register a domain name, which will become the URL (uniform resource locator) of your website. This is the address on the internet where this resource (your site) is located.    Getting a domain name could not be easier. You need to use a domain name registrar to find a free domain and register it in your own name. There are thousands of domain name registrars out there, but you will usually get a free domain thrown in if you choose the right web hosting company.   Which brings us on to web hosting. A web host basically gives your website somewhere to 'live'. These companies provide servers that you can store all the pages of your website on, and from where visitors to your site can download pages and information when they view your site. Providing such a service obviously costs money, so web hosting is an on-going cost. It is a competitive field so there is a lot of choice available, and consequently a lot of scope to go seriously wrong in your choice.   You cannot just go on price, and you cannot just go on what the web host says on their own website. What you need to know is what existing customers think of the host and use this feedback in conjunction with what the host provides and how much is costs. There are plenty of excellent value hosting companies out there, but there is also no shortage of ones that will drive you up the wall through hopeless support and unacceptable down time.   Once you have a domain name and a web host, you just need to create your site and upload it. Sounds simple doesn't it, and it can be. Website design does involve a whole new language (html), but you can actually get started quite well without any knowledge of this at all. They way to do this is by using a web design tool that allows you to create a site in a simple and familiar environment, and which translates what you do into html without you needing to get involved in that process. Such tools are known as wysiwyg editors. This acronym stands for 'what you see is what you get', and that is exactly what happens. You will be working in an environment that looks similar to a word processing package, but behind the scenes everything you do is translated into the language of a web site.   A word of warning about wysiwyg design tools. There are quite a lot out there and some are frankly not going to help you build a decent site. There are one of two free ones, and these in particular create extremely messy and superfluous code, which can create problems for you further down the line. There are other well known web design tools available, but these can be very expensive, and perhaps not ideal if this is your first website.