5 steps to create your own website

Would you love to create your own website or self-hosted blog?

Before that do you know maintaining your own site takes a lot of time / resource and patience ? Are you really sure you want to go solo? If you only need a blog, blogger and wordpress are good for most of them.

If you still think that you want to have your own website, here are 5 steps to create one on your own.

1. Know what lies ahead.
To start a website you need to register a domain name (www.premsagar.net). Then to publish your content there, you need a host (free or paid). And once these are available, you need to design your website. Then….you upload / publish your site. Then configure things. Maintain the website. Take backups. All these sound simple, but in some cases, it is not.

2. Register your domain
You need to see if the domain that you need is available or if someone else has taken it already. Once available, you can register it with any registrar like www.godaddy.com or www.namecheap.com. It could cost anywhere from a few (9 or 10) dollars to several dollars depending on your url name needs. Be sure to register with someone prominent in the industry. And make sure that you actually own your domain. Don’t buy it from your hosting company who can complicate things if you want to move to a different host. And free domains are a poor way of having your own domain.

3. Choose a host
Once you have a domain, its not enough. Its like having an address, but the house is not yet built. Hosts can be free (wordpress or blogger let you host your blog for free on your own website. But there could be some restrictions.) Or you could go with a paid host like www.bluehost.com (my host…..a good one so far) or www.hostmonster.com. The cost varies starts from less than 10$ per month. Blue host charges 7.95$ per month. But having a paid host means you have complete control on the website. Be sure to review the capabilities of the host. Don’t fall prey to campaigns like lowest price or huge disk space or bandwidth. Check their infrastructure capabilities. And most importantly, check their support response. Send them an email or chat at their website and check their response. And ask if you would get a full refund if you decide to terminate within, say, 30 days. Most of them do! Also make sure that the options available are good. For example, bluehost uses Fantastico which makes it very easy to install applications like Joomla or Wordpress. You can do it yourself, but if you have a tool that allows single click installation, its an added comfort.

3. Design your website.
Once you have signed up with a host, they provide you with a login. You can use it to go to the control area of the blog. From there, you can virtually control everything about your website. Design the web pages you need using the web designer the host provides (not always) or you can use some tool like kompozer to create web pages. Or you could use free templates available on the web. Or you could get it done profesionally. My suggestion is to design your own site yourself. Its easy once you get a hold on it. Just keep in mind that whatever you think is proper in your browser may not be proper at all in another browser like firefox.

4. Publish or upload your site.
Once you have designed your webpages, you are all set to publish them. You can either publish them using the tool used or you can upload them to the appropriate location in your public html directory. Check if they appear by visting your site from any browser.

5. Configure your account
Now that you have the website setup, you would need to configure things like email IDs, permissions to public areas on your website, spam control on your website, security of the site, etc. Most of these are decently managed by the capabilities provided by the hosting company. So do not hesitate to contact them for any help.

Recommendation of this blog

1. Godaddy for domain registration.
2. Bluehost / Hostmonster for paid hosting.
3. Wordpress for free blog hosting.
4. Wordpress for blog application.
5. Simple scripts is the best application installer. Very easy to use and is fast.