Website is almost a MUST for business companies or individuals who want to let the world knowing them. Most people are not the computer savvy. When they got an idea and wanted to have their website to be built, they have to spend tons of time to figure out how and what they need to do in order to get their website up and run.
This article explains the steps that you need to do in order to have your website to be developed and run on the internet.
Before we get started, there are some terms that you need to understand. These are: domain and web hosting.
Domain is the website URL that you enter in a browser address bar. For example, if you want to visit CNN website, you need to open your favorite browser and type in the www.cnn.com domain in the address bar and hit the Enter key. The browser will display the CNN website. The “cnn.com” is called domain in the computer world.
Web Hosting is the renting computer server process and resource services that can run your website (program). Thinking it like renting a car. If you want to go LA, you need to rent a car, you as the driver will drive the car to LA for whatever reason. Similarly, web hosting service provider is just like the car renting company, it provides the web hosting services (renting car).
So you said that you are ready to start building your website. What will you do first?
Step1: Register the domain for your website
Domain is like your company or personal name that someone can remember you and know you. It must be simple and match your company’s profile. People usually use their company or personal name as the domain. For instance, CNN uses cnn.com or GE uses ge.com for companies. President Barack Obama uses barackobama.com as his personal website.
To register domain, you need to find a domain registrar to do so. Today, registering a domain is relative cheap. Open google.com and search “domain registration”, you will find many providers. Within these domain registration providers, there is no much difference about the features but the prices. Bigger companies usually charge more. The price can be from $7.99 - $20+ per year. There is no reason you spend more than $20 while there is an $8.95 available.
With Inchol’s experiences, we have compared many providers and here are two domain registrars we recommend if you couldn’t find a good one.
www.netfirms.com offers $7.99 for first year and $9.95 per year thereafter.
www.omnis.com offers $8.95 per year.
Step2. Build the website
This is the most important step as this is what your visitor will see.
Write down or draw the layout of the concept of your website will help both you and the web design company to design the website that matches your business perfectly.
Things to consider:
- What’s type of the website? Business, E-commerce or others? Please view our article Types of Websites to understand more about it.
- How many sections on the website. Each section represents different topic you want on the website. For instance, About Us, Contact, Products or Services etc.
- Preparing the content, pictures or any other documents for each section.
Once you have these info ready, it’s time to find the right web design company. Many people say, that’s simple, I can have my son, my friend’s daughter or someone who is an individual to do that, as they know how to do the HTML and they have learned in school. Well, that’s sounds they can do. However, it depends on the purpose of the website that you are going to build. If it’s for the purpose of personal fun, no problem at all. But if it’s for a business and you want to do it seriously, then you should avoid doing so as the results would most likely be negative. It’s not the matter if you can see the website and click the link and go to the next page reading the content. It’s the matter of if your web pages and design are doing right. If you are not a web design expert, you won’t see much difference about the programming behind the scene, but the search engine like Google knows. Poor design turns down your website to open public for searching you, poor design restricts your future expansion, poor design requires you spending more time in the future for modification. Statistic shows that 99% of those poor designs eventually either stopped or redesigned from scratch by using professional web design companies. Professional web design companies have the professional point of view and the experiences when they design websites. All these knowledge are based on many succeeded projects developed for other customers, not from imagination.
Step 3 Rent Web Hosting Services
Once your website is ready, it’s time to move the website to run on a web server. The server must be highly reliable computer under well protected security environment. Some people host their website in office or home. Again, if the website is for personal fun, no question about it as you can save some bucks, but if it’s for business, move it out ASAP. Power off, spam, speed and many other unsure things could easily turn your website down. Think about it, what if your potential client wants to view your website to check out your company, after this clients has entered the domain you gave them, client couldn’t see anything about your company or the website is broken, what would this client feel?
There are many web hosting providers out there for you to choose. Finding the right web hosting provider is often a headache for someone who has never deal with it before. You never know the result until you have tried. Do a Google search for “web hosting provider” you will see many results. The web hosting companies usually have massive web hosting servers that host many websites. There are also many plans designed for different type of websites supporting from small broacher websites to mission critical websites. As a website owner, you should always apply the plan that fit your needs. If you ever need to find a plan, you should find the resources that fit your needs without overpaid. For example, thinking about the following two web hosting plans from two different companies:
1. $80/year 500M hard disk, 10G bandwidth
2. $250/year 50G hard disk space, 1000G bandwidth
If you have a broacher website with about 50 pages, which plan is the best? When you comparing these two plans, you may feel the option2 is good. However, have you ever think about how much actual resources you need to run for your website? Our experience tells us that such website usually takes about 150M disk space and consumes bandwidth less than 5G per month. Now the decision is pretty clear. Why do you spend the extra $170 to buy useless resources? You can always upgrade to another higher plan when your website reaches that level.
You may have heard of the new trend of the web hosting is moving to the virtual cloud web hosting system. The biggest player is Amazon right now. With Amazon’s EC2 cloud web hosting services, you pay for what you have used. This is revolutionary overturn to the traditional web hosting business model. This topic has beyond the scope of this article and we will cover this topic in another article.