How to Create a Website - Basic Steps
There are two ways of creating a website:
- The Easy Way
- The proper/hard way
If you are building a website for fun and you are not interested in making a business or creating a professional website, You don't need to learn the proper/hard way Yola.com would be more appropriate place for that purpose. However, if you are looking forward to creating something more serious, you have come to the right place.
Following are the basic steps for website creation:
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Basic understanding of HTML & CSS
The first thing you need to do is to have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. You really don't need to go deep into it because website developing software such as dreamweaver can do the Job for you, but even in order to operate dreamweaver properly you will need to have basic understanding of HTML & CSS.
Go to our " HTML and CSS tutorials " page to have a basic understanding of HTML & CSS.
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Find a topic for your website
It is recommended by most webmasters that you should create a website on a topic that interests you so that you are able to write plenty of content on it and thus attract reasonable amount of visitors. That is true to some extent, but if you plan to make money out of your website then it's not always the best strategy to choose a topic of your interest. The fact of a matter is there are plenty of niches which are much easier to monetize as compared to other niches. Now, if you want to make money out of your website you need to work hard on finding the correct niche.
Visit "Website Topics" for further details
Create Basic Layout of your Website
Professional outlook of a website is an absolute must for creating a successful website. After-all nobody would want to visit a site by an amateur webmaster. There are two ways of having a professional outlook for your website. First one is to gain proficiency in HTML and CSS and then create your own layout. The second way is to download a free website template and built your site on that template.
Free CSS website templates
HTML Layout tutorial
Choose Keywords
Choosing keywords can be a tricky concept for absolute beginners. Keywords are the words a user will type in search engine and then search engines will rank different websites related to those keywords according to relevance and usefulness. In every niche there are some keywords which are searched more often by users. So if you want to create a website with high traffic from search engines you should choose keywords which are searched more often by users. Later-on during the processes of content writing and on-page optimization you will mention your keywords in your title, headings and text. This will give you a higher rank in search engine for highly searched keywords and thus increase your traffic.
Visit "How do I find keywords" to find the best keyword finding strategies.
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Write Initial content
Once you have chosen your keywords the next thing you need to do is start creating your initial content. Among the initial content you must first create your homepage. Some webmasters suggest that homepage should be created after buying the hosting and domain name. However, I recommend doing it beforehand, so that you have a planned outlook and structure of your website before investing any money on it because most of First-timers come to realize the enormity of task after they actually start building pages of their website. Therefore, I recommend creating a homepage and writing initial content before investing any money. That way you will have the option of changing the topic or outlook of your website if you find out that you will have a hard time creating a website that you had initially planned.
Buying a domain name
This will be your first real investment during the process of website creation. Domain name is actually the address of the website . www.zackfire.com is an example of a domain name and 'yes' you have to pay for registering it. There are some websites which offer free registration but none of them offers attractive domains such as .com .net or .org. Now there are thousands of registrars but i would recommend big names such as GoDaddy or Network Solutions
. The only reason for this suggestion is their credibility. You would not want your domain to be in hands of some random registrar.
Read "How to choose domain" for further details.
Buying hosting
The second investment you have to make in order to create a website is buying hosting. A host can be thought of as a disk space on web where you can upload your stuff. Finding a host can be challenging but again I would recommend that you should go for huge names in hosting such a Hostgator or Lunar-Pages.
Point your domain to your host
Once you get both hosting and website-address, you need to connect them by pointing your domain(website address) to your web host. This is an easy step where you copy the nameservers of your host (about which you will be informed through email by your host after buying their services) and paste them in the domain manager of your domain registrar.
For further details read "Point domain to host".
On-Page SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique which will enables your site to rank high in search engines. There are two aspects of SEO, on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is done before uploading the pages and off-page SEO is done after uploading the pages. As mentioned above search engines rank pages after taking two things in consideration. The first one is relevance and second one is backlinks. Relevance part can only be done through on-page SEO, and backlinks part is done through off-page SEO. There are four main areas to focus on while doing on-page SEO. These are title of the page, headings, meta tags and content.
Read "On-page SEO " for further details.
Upload your Content
The next step is uploading the content. Once you point your domain to your host you will have to wait for more than 36 hours for your settings to take effect. Meanwhile I would suggest that you should upload you homepage and initial content to your host. Uploading the homepage during this period is suggested because it enables us to check whether website is up and running properly or not. If it is running properly then you will see your homepage once you enter your website address in browser. (You would not see your homepage unless you name it index.html)
Get indexed by search engines
Getting into search engines is not that difficult for professional web-masters but I have seen that beginners keep asking questions about it and just can't figure out the way to get into search engines as quickly as possible. For getting indexed faster visit " How to get in Google ".
Traffic Generation and off-page SEO
This is the toughest of all steps in website creation. Many of your fellow webmasters will give up during this process because it is long and requires dedication, belief, hard-work and above all out-of-box thinking. Off-page SEO is all about creating backlinks. During this process you will have to get backlinks from high quality websites which are related to your niche. This will boast your ranking on search engines and you will get more organic traffic.
Among other ways of traffic generation email marketing and social networking sites are very effective.
Read " How do I get backlinks ".
Add more content
Now, your website is ready and you should start adding more content to it. The more content you add the more are the chances of people finding you through search engines. This step of website creation will continue forever because search engines love sites that are updated frequently therefore its highly recommended that you should have as much content as possible.