Introduction – How To Build Your Own Website

In the following we will show you where to start and how to create a professional ‘Do It Yourself Website’ – without paying for a web designer, a website template, or any monthly fee other than to your domain name registrant and web host (we explain below what a ‘domain name’ and a ‘web host’ is in case you wonder why you need to pay for these services while we said earlier you can create your website for free. Stay with us. You’ll understand.).

What do you need to create your own website?

All you need is a computer with internet access, the willingness to learn the basics (we try to keep it as simple as possible but there are still some technical steps you will need to do manually), and the time to do it (depending on what you want to accomplish with your website or blog this could take anywhere from a weekend to several weeks).

Is ‘Do It Yourself Web Design’ for you?

The web changed so much the last years that it is now easier than ever to create your own website. We are confident that if you like working on the computer and browsing the internet, you should be able to do it. If you think you will enjoy watching your website grow and are willing to learn what it takes to get there, creating your own website is for you. Where most people eventually give up is that it will probably take you much longer than you anticipate when you do it for the first time. Some things seem to be a big hurdle, but in this case, instead of giving up you can shoot us a comment and we will try to help you. You will learn, and you will get good at it.

Are you ready? Great – then let’s start with a little theory about the different types of websites. (Again, feel free to skip to the next article at any time. You can always come back if you feel later you missed something. But we want to provide you with all information necessary to fully understand what you are doing if you are interested.).

Static vs. Dynamic Websites

Until about four years ago, most websites were ’static’. This means they were written in HTML (with enhancements in more advanced programming languages like Javascript). You can recognize ’static’ websites because the end in ‘.html’ or ‘.htm’. They are loaded into the visitor’s browser (Internet Explorer or else), and were therefore limited in what the visitor’s browser would let them do. If your visitors had high security settings and blocked potentially risky scripts in your HTML code they could not enjoy all of your website’s content. It was also very easy for hackers to read all your scripts and data from the HTML file. If you wanted to create your own website, you would usually download a free ‘template’ either from the web or your Microsoft Frontpage library, learn basic HTML to manipulate the files with a HTML editing program, upload them with a FTP program to a web server, and repeat the whole procedure every time you had the slightest change. This certainly worked for ‘Website Do it Yourselfers’ as designed, but not necessarily always as expected and these websites never looked quite professional.

With the internet getting more and more ‘interactive’, these days are officially over and it is easier than ever to build your own website – we are talking about a real professional looking site here – with little technical understanding and programming knowledge. This is possible with the next generation of ‘dynamic’ websites. Dynamic websites are mostly written in PHP and your web server will actually do all the work for the visitor’s computer. It will run all scripts, so your visitor’s internet browser just gets the clean HTML file to show. But that’s not all: Dynamic websites can also be easily connected to SQL databases and automatically keep track of every piece of content on your website. All you as the webmaster have to do is log into the ‘back office’ part of your website and easily add or edit text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of! It’s as easy as writing a letter in Word, or uploading photos from your digital camera. The major advantage of using such a dynamic website is that with such a ‘back office’ the management of your website requires virtually no technical skills or knowledge.

In The Following We Will Show You How To Easily Install And Build Your Own Dynamic Website.

What You Can Do With Your Own Dynamic Website:

• Create your own individual highly professional looking website or blog
• Install within minutes and start adding content to your website
• No additional costs or fees for templates, set-up or maintenance
• Easily add or edit content from inside your ‘back-office’
• Choose from thousands of free themes for a professional looking design
• Add hundreds of free extensions like contact forms, photo galleries, event calendars

What Do You Need In Order To Build Your Own Dynamic Website?

A Domain Name

Your website needs a name. It’s called ‘domain name’ and it is the online address of your website like www.yourwebsite.com. All domain names worldwide need to be registered with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) through authorized registrants. Your web hosting company (we explain this next) will do this for you. Note: While it is most comfortable to have your domain name and web hosting with the same company, you can save about $5 per year for a ‘.com’ domain name when you register your domain name with a specialized domain name registrant like Godaddy and not with your hosting company. In this case you will have to set your ‘name servers’ in the registrant’s account to point to your web hosting account. Don’t worry, we will show you how to do this later in the course.

An Account With A Web Hosting Company

In order to get your website on the internet, you will need a web hosting company, no matter whether you create your website yourself, or have a professional web designer company do it for you.

Why do I need a web hosting company? Can’t I store my website files on my own computer?

A web hosting company will store your website files on their servers which are running special web hosting programs (e.g. PHP, CGI, SQL and security software). Unless your computer has all these programs installed, you cannot use it as a web server, and will have to pay one of these companies for ‘website hosting’.

There are literally thousands of web hosting company out there – a few good companies and of course many black sheeps like in every industry. Their prices rank typically from very cheap ($1 per month) to expensive (over $25 per month). And in this industry, you do get what you pay for. Which doesn’t mean you need to pay an arm and a leg for web hosting! As San Diego web designers we have dealt with all the major web hosts out there. For over 8 years we could gain experience as some of our customers were already using other companies. We have learned how valuable a good host with reliable equipment, good security and anti-spam software and great customer service is.

The best web host we have found during all these years is Hostgator. We use them for our own websites and recommend them enthusiastically to all our new customers. Especially because we are very pleased with their excellent 24/7 phone or online chat customer service (they are NOT outsourced outside of the US!).

This concludes Lesson 1.
In Lesson 2 you will learn how you can set up a dynamic website in just minutes.

If after reading this lesson you realize that a ‘DIY website’ is not for you, and you would like a web designer to do your website, feel free to visit us at Websites Are Us- Your San Diego Web Designer – we are happy to help you with your website design.

More Articles from the series DIY Web Design

1. Introduction – How To Build Your Own Website