John Taylor Editor of Website Creator magazine presents this simple guide is a fantastic place to start as it will help you produce a site you’re proud of and save you a lot of time. Making your own website is much more than designing a web page, but the excellent news is it has never been simpler to place your thoughts on to the Internet.  You can produce a family site, or a corporate site using templates which can be customised in such a way that your site won’t end up looking like everyone else’s. Templates and web wizards are fantastic because they help you to produce a professional looking site, even if your design capabilities are limited, or you are just pushed for time. Making a website these days is so simple anyone can do it, but this is still a closely guarded secret as industry Web Masters don’t want you to know. This guide will get you started arm you with the knowledge that will enable you to produce your family or a professional business site.

1/. Plot your Website Taking a bit of time to plot the structure/layout is guaranteed to save you time and make adding pages and updating your website simpler in the future. A small plotting saves a lot of time, but the amount of plotting you do will depend on what you have plotted for your website. If this is your first website, and you want to produce a personal or family home site then you might not need much of a plot. A family website can be as simple as one web page called the home page. When you register your domain name most excellent domain registration agents provide a home page as parking for the site. This is like staking out a claim on your small patch of Internet land. But, if you are plotting for your site to have more than one page putting a small thought into the structure of your site will help. Take a look at our “anatomy” diagrams to get some thoughts on website layout.

Following these plans will insure each of your pages has a link and therefore, can be read by your users, there is nothing more frustrating than producing a web page, publishing the site and realising many weeks later no one can really get to the page as you haven’t provided a link on any of the other pages to it. The thought you place into plotting your site will help you get a grip on what should be on every page of your site.  Your plot can be a simple pencil and paper sketch (I recommend a pencil because you can make changes with a pencil and an eraser). Note at this stage don’t involve your PC you will find a sketch quicker and simpler.  Your sketch needs to have a structure. It should contain a succinct guide of what information your site will contain and where. Furthermore, you need to highlight what links you will have on the page, for example, what pages it connects to and what pages connect to it. Finally, you need an thought of what will the page look like, what colour scheme will you use, what fonts, and what will your buttons look like. (Note you can get free templates on the web that will provide a quick start and bypass this part of the plotting). But, if you are looking for a unique website that no-one has seen before you will need to go through this plotting stage.

The larger more complicated Website, the more complex the plotting will need to be, and the more vital it is not to skip this stage. Don’t let a huge site frighten you into submission so you run away screaming. Take the common sense approach, and break the huge problem down into a series of small sections a section can literally be a section of your website or even as small as one page. Plot each of these small bite sized sections of your site, and soon you will have completed the whole thing without drama. It doesn’t matter how huge your site is a simple sketch can still contain all the information you need for a section of your site you will just end up with a huge pile of sketches. Finally, you need one master sketch that represents the outline or site map. There are no hard and quick rules as to what you should place in your sketches, that’s up to you and your time constraints. The usual rule of thumb is that the more time you spend plotting the less time you spend building and tweaking your website. 2  Make your Web pages Web pages are the elements of your site. Every web page is made in a web language called HTML (which stands for HyperText Markup Language), you can learn how to become a HTML programmer or use a web page design package to produce your pages. We recommend you start by using a web page design package. It is possible to make your website by programming it in a web language known as HTML using this method you don’t need any special software all you need is a text editor such as NotePad or WordPad both are supplied free with Windows. Hand coding as it’s called used to be the only way of producing pages. We would not recommend it these days as it means you will need to learn the programming language and HTML is not at all friendly.

I recommend you use a graphical web page “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) editor . The editor will then generate HTML code for the pages. The advantages of using HTML to code your pages are that you have complete control of your pages the disadvantage is that unless you’re a fantastic designer they will look dated and lack style. 3 Place it on the Web “If you build it, they will come”, but only if you have your search engine optimisation right! Before prospective users can view your Website, you must first publish it — this involves getting a domain name then copying your web pages to a web server or host and finally registering with the search engines. Finally you can buy a commercial package, Dreamweaver from Adobe is the industry standard but Magix Website Maker or homepage MAKER from bhv is also worth a look if you’re a beginner. When you have finished building your site you will need to reckon of a domain name and register it.

A domain name is your small bit of the Internet, it’s your turf, your real estate. Your small bit of the Internet needs to be uniquely identifiable. Your domain name is also your website address or URL,  (clarified in my previous blog entry) Therefore, why would you pay for a domain name, especially if your favourite name is already taken? Typing either your domain name, your name or your company name into a search engine is the way most visitors will find your site, so you don’t want to be remembered as a small chunk of a much larger site. Not registering a domain name and using a sub domain name, means you will end up with a long non-memorable name which users won’t type into any search engine. For example, many free web hosts assign you a domain name, which may be long and tough to spell, for example, www.essential-mags.porter5.com. www.essential-mags.com would be much simpler to remember and to type into a search engine. Having your own domain name also presents a much more professional image of yourself or your company and can be seen as on a par with designing your company logo or headed paper and business cards. A clever carefully thought out name can get you remembered, just look at two examples www.google.com and www.ebay.com. Who on the planet has not heard of these names!

Once you reckon you have your domain name bounce it around as many people as possible to get their feedback, they might even come up with a fantastic name out of the blue. When you finally have your name you need to check it’s available, but be prepared for disappointment as you can bet someone will have gotten there before you. See the box to the left for websites that will help you check your domain is still available.Once you have your site layout, your domain name and your web pages you are ready to publish them on the internet. If you build your own web pages using a graphical web page editor then the pages are stored on your PC. In this case, you will have to register with a web host, such as Host1Plus offering packages to suit all pockets, including packages that include registering a domain name, web space, traffic band width (visitors to your site), email and tools to build your site. Internet Service Providers In order to upload your page you are going to need to be able to access the Internet, we are assuming you already have a broadband account. Host1Plus can help here.

Once you have registered with Host1Plus, if your web pages are currently stored on your PC you will need a method of transferring them to your hosts online server this is usually done by connecting to a FTP server, you don’t need any special software. If you are making lots of changes to your web pages including regular updates you might consider a dedicated FTP package such as CoffeeCup FTP, see our guide on page 34, or WS_FTP. An FTP site is like a large filing cabinet,  with a traditional filing cabinet, the person who does the filing has the option to mark and organise the files, but, they see fit.  They also choose which files to keep locked, and which remain public. It is the same with a FTP site, in order to gain access to a FTP site a UserID and Password are needed. If the creator of the FTP site is willing to give everyone access to the files, the UserID is ‘anonymous’ and the Password is your email address (e.g. name@domain.com). If the FTP site is not public, there will be a unique UserID and Password for each person who is granted access. Host1Plus provide a control panel to make FTP management simple. For example, all you have to do is start the control panel click on FTP Management to select it, and then click on Make FTP account. Now fill in FTP user name enter password, or you can select to generate password for you and select path for account access. To publish your website you must transfer the pages to the Host1Plus web server, You will gain access to this server via FTP, as described above Host1Plus  will send your logon details for the FTP server. Next comes the moment of truth when you fire up your web browser and type in your domain name URL for example www.yourname.com and your pages are showed for the first time.

Look here: http://www.host1plus.com

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