So you want a web site? What do you do next? How do you get it? How do you create it?
Deciding to have a web site is a big step, here are some tips to help.
First you need to decide what is going to be on your site, what you want to offer and who your audience is. You must offer something on a web site in order to get people there and you need to decide who your audience it to make it appropriate.
Once you have decided what you want to offer and who your audience is, you need to get your ideas together. You need to get the info you want on the site, pictures, and anything else you want on your site together. Going over all the content that will be on your site is a good idea because it will allow you to see if you have any conflicting information and serve as the first time you edit the content. You should also type all of your information orderly in a Word doc to help with spelling and grammar and because having it in a digital form will help you much later when you copy and paste it in your site.
Next, you need to decide what type of site you want. This blog posting is not aimed at web professionals so I will not speak of the many content management services. For simplicity, you need to decide if you want a traditional static web site where the pages are changed manually or if you need some sort of content management system. You would want a content management system if you are going to write about stuff often. For example, if you are a food critic, you will be writing about restaurants often. For this instance, you would want a blogging service. There are many out there like blogspot and wordpress. You can get a free account from most of these. I actually suggest WordPress at Wordpress.com or going to Wordpress.org and installing the free blog software with your own hosting which will give you more options and features.
Now you need to find out the name or web address which is really called a domain name and where to host your site, the place you site will be on the web. If you choose to put your site on wordpress.com, you will already have a domain name. There are free and paid ways to host a web site but if you want your own unique domain name, you need to pay. For example, you can get a free site from Yahoo’s geocities but your domain name will be *****.geocities.com. So if you wante bigpcgeek, it would be bigpcgeek.geocities.com. The other downside is that you will have adds on your web site which would be great if you mad the money but you don’t. If you want your own unique domain name like www.bigpcgeek.com, you will have to buy a domain name and web hosting from sites like GoDaddy or Domain.com. I suggest 1and1.com because they always seem to have the most to offer for the best price. When purchaseing hosting from 1and1.com, you can create a web site from scratch or use their own site builder. When you create you own site, there is no limit, when you use their site builder, there is a limit on pages and on content. If you have no idea how to do any of this, you might want to get some help from companies like BigPcGeek.com (yes, a shameless plug) who create web sites from scratch. If you decide to create your web site on your own from scratch, you will need software to create it like DreamWeaver or FrontPage.
After your site is created, you need to get your site on the net. Huh? Ok so your site is on the net when you type www.****.com in your web browser but what about when you search for it on Google. If it is not in Google, you don’t exist online. Most hosting companies offer SEO (search engine optimization) help or paid SEO to help get you on search engines. First, do not pay for any SEO, it is all free. If your web host gives you a free service like 1and1 does, use it but if not, don’t waste your money on it when it is free. All you have to do is do a Google search for site submission on the search engine of your choice. For example, if you do a Google search for "submit site to Google," the first result will google.com/addurl where you can add your web site to Google. It can take a few months but you will eventually be one Google’s search results. You don’t want to stop there, you will want to talk to your web designer about meta tags to get better relevant results, get other web sites to link to you, and finally keep the most relevant information of your site at the top of the page. All will help to get the people you want to your site.
This is just a start, I hope it helps.
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