Create and Register A Website
If you're going to have an online business, the first thing
you'll need to do of course is to put up a website. You may have
never given any thought at all to what it takes to create and
manage a website, but there's more to it than you might think.
The first thing you'll have to decide is what to name your
website, also known as your domain name, or URL. This is the
part of your website's name that comes after the "www". You can
name your site anything you like, but you have to name it
something unique. There are web sites that let you check on the
availability of a domain name, but usually you can do that at
domain registrar's site, which we'll cover next.
After ensuring that you have chosen a unique name, you have to
register it with a Domain Name Registrar. A Domain Name
Registrar is a company which handles the registration, tracking,
and reporting of domain names across the Internet. In the old
days of the Internet there was only one Registrar, but a few
years ago that was changed and now there are many companies to
choose from. Search for "domain name registrar" in your search
engine to a company to use.
The next thing on your list is to decide who is going to host
your website. For this you need a hosting company. A hosting
company is simply a company that has a bunch of computers, known
as servers, hooked up to a really fast Internet connection. You
pay them a monthly fee and they give you a certain amount of
space on one of their servers. If you're really ambitious, you
can host it yourself on one of your own computers. But this is
hardly ever recommended for a commercial website because of the
need for an extremely reliable Internet connection, and because
of the amount technical competency required to make sure your
server is properly configured to handle all of the different
types of programs required to serve up your web pages.
The next thing you'll have to do is create the web pages
themselves. If you've ever paid much attention to the address,
or URL, bar in your browser, you'll know that most web pages are
named something-or-other.html (or sometimes just .htm). Most
likely you'll want to hire this process out to a professional
web design company. They will consult with you to find out what
kind of content you want and the overall theme of your site, and
they will handle the (extremely) tedious process of creating the
code for the actual pages. If you're on a really tight budget
you could purchase a pre-packaged web site known as a
"template", and replace the generic content with your own
content on the pages. Even this method will probably require
some professional help, but it won't be nearly as intensive, or
expensive, as a custom site.
At this point your site should be up and working, but no one
will know how to find it yet. For that you have to make sure it
can found by the search engines so that anybody who is looking
for your type of product or service will be able to find you.
That's a huge topic in and of itself, and we'll go into that a
little later.
Till next time...Success to you!
-Ted