Make Your Own Website

Making your own personal or business web site is NOT a complicated or expensive thing to do. You may have been told that it is, but in fact it requires no more technical knowledge than writing an email. This page is here to help you get started with making, maintaining, and marketing your own website.

Individuals and small/medium sized businesses can save literally thousands of dollars using simple online tools to make their own websites. With the right tools, choosing the "make your own website" route does not have to mean sacrificing quality or results. 

Intro: The Anatomy of a Website

Concept 1: Domains

Domains are the "real estate" of making a web site.  A domain is something like "google.com."  Domains are "registered" rather than purchased outright.  A domain "registration" transaction (from 1-10 years in length) is done through a "registrar."

Choosing a good domain name is probably the most important decision you'll make as you begin to make a website.

Concept 2: Hosting

Hosting is the "utility bill" of making your own website.  People from all over the world can see a particular website more or less the same way on different computers in different locations.  This is because they when you choose a web site to visit with your web browser program (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Mac Safari, or something similar), this program actually connects your computer (and those of other visitors in different places) to a single central computer known as a server.   When the browser connects, it downloads or obtains copies of the files that make a up a website, and then displays them on the screen.  Often a single "server" will have the files for many different websites.  Housing and serving these files to browsers that request them is done by a "web hosting" service. 

Concept 3: Pages

A single website consists of several pages, or screens of information. The first page you see when you visit a web site at a particular domain (in this case, www.makemyownwebsite.net), is known as the home page. The simplest website consists of a single page.  However in most cases it is desirable to have more than one page on a site.  Each page can be thought of as a document like a word processor document.  It is given a name, known as a URL.  If you wanted your website to have a separate page with contact information, then it would be good to create a page with the page name or URL of "contact."  The full URL of this page is your domain plus the name of the page, in this case www.yourdomain.com/contact.  A web page simply consists of text and image files, which can be entered, inserted, and formatted just like in a word processing document.

Concept 4: Links

To move between pages on a web site, visitors must click on text or images that represent "doorways" to new pages.  These are called links or "hyperlinks."  A hyperlink is created by selecting some text or an image on a web page, and clicking an icon that lets you enter the URL of a new page to link to, the same way as you would highlight some text in a word processor and then click the B icon to make it bold.  Then when someone clicks on this part of your web page, they will be whisked over to the new page.

That's It!

You are now armed with the basic knowledge needed to make your own web site.  There are of course more details that can be explored, but you've learned enough to begin to create your own website with the right tools to assist you.

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Website Builder Free: This "do it yourself" website solution comes complete with advertisement-free web hosting, an easy to use online website builder, and email forwarding @yourdomain.com. All these services are included in the cost of the domain registration at just $34.95 per year.