This is a simple guide for beginners wanting to know how they can make a website.

1. Register a domain name

A domain name is an address that people can find you by on the web. Every domain is unique– it consists of a name and an extension.

Example: frillymillyclothing.com.au

 frillymillyclothing is the name and .com.au is the extension.

You can buy an existing domain name (if it’s available) or create your own domain name. It can be very expensive to buy an existing domain name– especially if it consists of less than five letters!

2. Decide what kind of website you need

Brochure website
A ‘brochure website’ will consist of around three to five pages– Homepage, About Us, Contact Us and perhaps a page or two that describes your goods and services. This website does not sell anything directly. It’s there to tell web users about your business and as a contact point for new or existing customers. This kind of website is generally not updated frequently.

Although a brochure website is small, it can be of huge benefit to your business–  potential customers are increasingly searching the internet for local goods and services. You can also provide your website address on your business cards and letterheads.
You can gain traffic to your website through advertising, search engine optimisation or a blog that is attached to your website.

Ecommerce website
An ecommerce website sells or takes orders for goods and/or services. If there are going to be many categories and types of products, you’ll need it all managed by a CMS (content management system) and/or shopping cart software. A CMS or shopping cart might form the base of your website, with a template customising the look of your site. Templates might come packaged with your CMS or shopping cart or you might be able to purchase one. Better still, a web designer can create a unique template for you.

A community website
A community website can be commercial or nonprofit.  A community website can simply contain information and resources for a community, or/and it can also have a base of members who interact with each other. If you want to create a community website, you will first need to ensure that the program you use will be able to accommodate your members. Your options include forum software, free community websites such as ning.com and wetpaint.com and custom-built solutions.

If you intend your community to grow very large, this might mean you’ll need to upgrade the kind of web hosting you use. Many people use shared web hosting as it can cost as little as $15 (or even less) per month. Dedicated hosting will provide you with your own IP address and server space, which you do not share with anyone else.

Blog
A blog is a simple CMS (content management system) with a vast variety of applications. If you want a website with an informal feel– where people can comment on your pages and you can interact with them, a blog is the solution for you. People use blogs for everything from sharing personal life journeys to ecommerce websites. A blog can be just anything you want it to be. With the well-known blogging software, WordPress, there are hundreds of free themes and plugins available to extend the look and functionality of your blog. You can even start a blog where you offer your readers their own blogs– WordPress MU.

A blogger is known as someone who frequently writes posts to their blog (daily or weekly) and whom is usually known on a fairly personal level to his or her readers. Blogging is a form of internet culture– bloggers often interact with each other as well as their readers.

Special purpose
If you want to start a website that has a special purpose– such as a review website, games website, quiz website, survey website, real estate website or article website– you’ll generally need purpose-built software. If your plan is to build something small, such as a quiz for a class of school students, you might be able to find some free software on the web. But in the case that your plan is to build a large, complex website– paying experts to create it for you is the best option. If the kind of application you want doesn’t exist, you’ll need to pay to have it built from the ground up.

3. Decide how you will create your website

Web designer
A designer can create unique, customised solution for you from the ground up.

Knowing as much as possible about what you want in a website before contacting a web designer can help speed the process up, and will give your designer a clearer idea of what you you expect out of your website.

A web designer can also give you their expert opinion on the best website for your needs and budget.  It might suit you to have a website that starts out relatively small but can easily be expanded at a later date.

Website builder
There are lots of website builders on the market, both paid and free. If you have time and don’t mind dealing with a few of the slightly technical aspects of building a website yourself, a website builder might suit you.
Some require a little coding knowledge, while others require no coding knowledge at all. Some require that you build your web pages online, while others are built on your hard drive and sent via FTP to your web host’s server.

When it comes to buying online, web users expect highly professional-looking websites with very secure transactions.  If you’re building a large ecommerce website, trying to do it all yourself could prove to  be time-consuming and frustrating.

Programmer
If you require a special purpose website (see above)– you might need a programmer who can develop the software that you use or who can adapt existing software to your needs.

Free website
You might choose a free website option for a blog, for a hobby website, or for a business website in which you pay for upgrades further down the track.
Some free website companies offer a variety of features, including contact forms, user registrations and shopping carts. There are some great free website options out there on the web!

Note: We recommend registering a domain name as the first step, even if your website is going to take months in development.

Domain names are relatively cheap (starting at around $12 per year for an Australian domain)– so if you change your mind later on, you’ve only lost a small amount of money.

The benefits to securing your domain name early is to avoid losing it if someone else registers it, and you can also throw up a quick one-page website while your website is being developed.

Search engines want to return the most relevant results for people. You need to tell search engines what each and every page on your website is about (the pages you want visitors to land on that is.)  The way in which you optimise your website will differ according to the nature of your website.

This is a basic beginners guide to optimising your web pages:

Making your website crawlable
(If your website can’t crawled, a search engine will be left scratching its head, clueless as to what your pages are about!)

If a search engine cannot look through your pages and cannot follow your links, your pages won’t be indexed (won’t appear in search engine results).
Some kinds of Flash and Javascript code makes it difficult for your website to be crawled. If you’re using robots.txt on your pages, check that it’s only being used on the pages that you don’t want search engines to crawl (such as duplicate content.)

If you’re not sure about any of the above, a good place to go to check crawlability  is to register with Google Webmaster Tools.

(You’ll need to add their code to your website before you can begin.) In your Webmaster Tools dashboard, you’ll see if there have been any crawl errors or pages restricted by robots.txt. You can then look under diagnostics for further information.

Good title tags
(A title tag is the most important description for your website – in just one line!) Title tags are the clickable links you see in search engine results. So, if you’re searching for women’s boots, you’ll see a page of results with titles you can click on.

When you click on one of the results, you’ll see the title tag again– above the page in the tab. The title tage tells a search engine what your pages are about. A mistake beginners often make is to place the same title tag for every page of their website, or to not place any title tag at all on their pages.In Google, the length of title tags is 65 characters. You can make a title tag that is longer or shorter– but a longer title tag will not be shown in full in the search results.

Good domain name
A domain name that accurately describes the nature and place of your business tells a search engine what your business is and where it is. For example, camdencarpentry.com.au states what and where. Of course, if you’re trying to brand a business, often a domain name that states the ‘what and where’ either doesn’t ‘have a ring to it’ or isn’t available. But keeping the name easy to spell and as short as possible will help when people go to type your domain name into a search engine or address bar.

Good URLS
Some websites, particularly ecommerce and some content management system sites may have URLs that neither search engines or web visitors can decipher. If possible, have clear URLs that describe each page. For example:  chocolateheaven.com.au/dark-chocolate-bars.html

Use dashes between the words in your page URLs. They make it easier for web users to read, and also easier for search engines to parse. 

Here’s a silly example of a URL with no separating dashes:

Candi is a photographer who uploads a web page full of photos of people on a windy day. She wants to name her page Candi’s gusting wind. 

photowebsite/candisgustingwind.html

A web user or search engine could read this as:

‘Can disgusting wind’ — which sounds more like a web page offering a solution for flatulence!

Using dashes quickly solves this:

photowebsite/candis-gusting-wind.html

Special key words and phrases for your pages
(Yep, you get to select your own unique set of words and phrases that describe your website)

For each page of your website (that you want visitors to land on) — write down short phrases that describe each page. The phrases can be two, three, or four words in length– or longer. Now go back and craft these phrases so that they resemble the phrases that people would use when searching for your product or service. For example, if you sell women’s fashion accessories, you might be selling– handbags, scarves, belts and jewellery. For each of these, you can come up with a set of key phrases. that describe the products that you’re selling.

Good quality inbound links
Inbound links are links coming from other websites to yours.  If a link comes from an established, respected website, this is like a vote for your website. It tells a search engine that your web page (or pages) has content that another website found valuable or interesting in some way. Such links are particularly good if they come from a web page that concerns the same subject as the web page of yours it is linking to. For example, a link coming from a page about children’s health going to a page about children’s health on another website might be held in higher regard by a search engine than if that same inbound link was coming from a page about lawnmowers.

Good quality outbound links
Outbound links are links going from your website to other websites.  If you have links going to spammy, low-quality websites, this does not look good to a search engine. If you link to other sites, the links are best going to respected websites that will provide value to web visitors. Blogs will often have links in the comments area that go to spam websites. You can nofollow the links in your blog comments. If you nofollow a link, it means you are not giving a vote to the web page the link goes to.

Onsite links
Many people don’t realise they can also vote for their own pages by the way they link to pages within their website. Ensure that the most links on your site go to your most important pages.

Sitemap
A sitemap sets out your website structure clearly to a search engine. You can also specify your most important pages.

It’s not a matter of figuring out the best web host. it’s a matter of finding a web host that suits your needs, at the right price.

Arm yourself with as much knowledge about what you plan to do with your website (or websites) – and then hit the presales question area of your web host’s support forum. No support forum? A forum is not necessary, but can be a valuable feature for many newbies. Read on to find out why!

 
<h2>Web host services and features:</h2>
 

<strong>Reputation</strong>

Reputation is important. You want a solid company hosting your website – not one who might go out of business six months down the track. Check the review sites to see which companies are at the top of the lists.

A couple of web host review sites:

http://www.webhostingreport.com
http://webhostinggeeks.com

<strong>Cost</strong>

Hosting for a small business website is commonly under USD $10 per month. Don’t pay for more than what you need. Often, you can upgrade later on if your needs outgrow your current hosting.  Many web hosts offer shared hosting to keep prices down – shared hosting refers to websites sharing the one IP address. Dedicated hosting is used for websites with greater requirements.

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<strong>Uptime</strong>

Uptime is the amount of time each day that your website is available to web visitors. Downtime means that visitors cannot access your website, which can lose you sales or potential customers/members. A website with a lot of downtime will also end up losing rankings in search engine results.  A good uptime is 99.98% or higher.

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<strong>Bandwidth</strong>

Bandwidth refers to data transfer. Every time a visitor simply looks at a web page, they are downloading data.  The amount of data that a web host makes available to your account is your bandwidth. Some web hosts offer as little as 50 megabytes.  Others offer bandwidth in gigabyes, or even unlimited bandwidth. Something to remember is to check the TOS (Terms of Service) of a web host if you have specific requirements for your website, such as streaming video or web chat facilities. Even with unlimited bandwidth on offer, web hosts will generally have a clause termed ‘Fair Use’.

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<strong>Disk Space</strong>

Disk space is the space on your web host’s server where you store the files for your website. A personal or small business website will generally not require more than a few megabytes of storage.  A ten-page website with pages of 100KB each will only use around one megabyte in total.  Some web hosts are offer unlimited disk space. Others might only offer 100 megabytes or less. But if you wish your web pages to load in quickly for visitors, you won’t want to go crazy using up hundreds of megabytes of disk space.

If your plan is to start a start that will be graphics-heavy, or a site where people will be uploading photos or videos, carefully consider whether the amount of disk space offered is suitable for your needs.

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<strong>Location of web host</strong>

If you’re trying to target a certain country with your website, it’s best to have your web host’s servers located in that country. If you wish to target Australia for example, having Australian web hosts can help Google understand that your website targets Australians. It’s not essential, but is a factor in effective geotargeting.

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<strong>Support</strong>

Good support is crucial when your website has gone down for no apparent reason, and you have just started a big business promotion! You need action, and you need it fast.

Ask yourself:

What kind of response times does a web host offer? Do they offer support 24 hours around the clock? Do they offer phone support as well as via email? Do they offer support in your native language?

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<strong>Extra domains</strong>

You want to start a new website. Does that mean you need to purchase another web hosting account? With some web hosts you do, but with many these days, you can have a number of domains on the one web hosting package – even unlimited domains. If you plan on having more than one website, have a look at whether or not you can have your extra websites with the one hosting account.

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<strong>Website builder</strong>

If you plan on using a site builder to create your website, check to see if your host offers one.  Be sure to fully test the builder before signing up with the host. A builder can often help you to put together a website quickly and easily. But remember that your needs are likely to grow and change – so if the builder is very basic you could soon outgrow it.

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<strong>Green energy</strong>

Are you a greenie? Some web hosts use green energy to operate their servers and offices.  Green energy sources may include solar and wind energy.

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<strong>Support forum</strong>

Support forums can offer enormous value to a newbie webmaster.  Members of a support forum are often able to provide answers to all kinds of questions that pop into your head as you’re creating your website.  If you want to know if the colors you’ve used on your website clash, don’t try asking your web host – ask a forum member!

Not all web hosts provide support forums. And of the web hosts that do have forums, not all have managed to help create a thriving community. If a forum is important to you, what you want to look for is a large member base of many thousands, a friendly attitude towards newbies, and lots of activity. The networking and friendship you can find on such a board is worth its weight in gold, especially when you’re just starting out.

Don’t just pick any site builder though – there are good ones, very basic ones, and ones that will have you tearing your hair out in frustration!

Here are some things you should think about:

Online site builder:
How do I backup my files? Are my files kept on the servers of an online company? If so, is the company solid and dependable? What happens if the company goes out of business – do I lose my website? What kind of uptime does the company offer?
Having a builder only accessible online can also present difficulties if your internet connection is slow or slow at times.

Offline site builder:
Will the builder work with my computer’s operating system? How do I save my files? How do I publish my pages? Having a site builder on your hard drive means you are not reliant upon the the internet to work on your website. It might mean a larger learning curve in finding out how to manage your files, design your site and publish.

General:

Does the builder create search-engine-friendly URLs?

Can I choose what kind of URLs are created for my pages?

How many pages can I create? Limited or unlimited?

Does it come with a photo gallery? A form maker? Shopping Cart? Pay Pal facilities?

Does it come with templates? Are the templates customizable? Can I import templates? Can I design my own templates?

If I want to create additional websites with the builder, can I do this–or do I have to purchase another instance of the builder?

How do I use HTML or outside scripts with the site builder?

Is the website builder being updated on a continuing basis? Are the updates free?

How does the site builder manage search engine optimization for users? Are there instructions on how to use the builder to achieve optimal results with search engines?

What kind of support is offered for the builder?

Is there an active support forum where I can pick up tricks and tips, and receive feedback on my website?

Important:
Not all of the above questions apply to every website builder, and you might have additional questions according to your own specific needs.