Choosing The Right Kind Of Website Solution

Choosing The Right Kind Of Website Solution

By:


How to make your own website these should be a relatively simple task. The difficulty is how to select the important information about making your own website from the unimportant and not get totally overwhelmed in the process!

In reality making your own website usually comes down to covering some simple points should lead you to having the website you wanted.

The first question to ask yourself is, "Why do I want a website?" A website must have a reason for existing and ultimately it must serve a purpose for somebody. Even if it only serves you, somebody must benefit from it being there.

Personal Websites

At this point you can probably go with free services as they are a great way to get start learning have no financial penalty if you fail!

If you have something important, interesting, amusing, opinionated or whatever to say and want people to know about it you would be best served by a blog. With a blog you can happily and frequently post you inner thoughts and opinions to the world and have others comment and interact with you.

The easiest and cheapest way to go here is by using one of the many free blog services available. Blogger.com and Wordpress.com are a couple of the free blog sites and you can take a look at squidoo.com and hubspot.com interesting alternatives.

Kids Websites

Freewebs.com and freehostia.com offer free hosting and simple to use design software that is very suitable for building a website for kids. They are also a good place to start if you want to have a site for the family or a social group. In the case of family or social sites if you are going to be using a lot of photos then there is also flikr.com and ifunpix.com which allow online sharing of your photos.

Stay Home and Meet People

The social networking sites are what you are looking for. The kings of this area at the moment are twitter.com and facebook.com and are both great places to begin your whirlwind of virtual social engagements!

Bear in mind your first choice from these suggestions may very well be wrong. The beauty of these services is that they are free, so there are no costly mistakes and more importantly they will introduce you to what you can and can't do with that service. Armed with that information you can then progress to the exact service and website format you need with confidence.

Business Websites (Existing business that want to go online or starting an online business)

It is not actually true that every business on the planet needs to have a presence on the internet. However it is true that many businesses that should be on the internet are not. One of the main reasons for this is that they either don't know why they should or don't know how to go about it properly.

There are a few points to consider here in how to go about making your own website.

Hosting: Hosting is simply a service that provides a place for your site on the internet so that others can find it. For business a free hosting service is unsuitable for a number of reasons.

A free hosting service will most likely be running ads on your site to offset the cost of running the service. Very often these will be context ads that will probably be running ads for your competitors!

A free hosting service may not allow you to have full control over the domain name of your site. With a free service your domain name will most likely be something like "www.freehostingforwebsites.com/user/12345/greeblies.com." Trust me, the search engines nor anyone else will NEVER find your site!

Finally the point of reliability. You want the site to be up and running 24/7 and whilst the free services may say they have great uptime statistics in this world you get what you pay for.

Design: There are many website hosting services that offer the use of a site-builder as part of their hosting package. There are a few good points and bad points to this in relation to the site building software itself and how it is integrated into the hosting package as well.

First the software. Web hosting companies offer two types of software for you to design your own site and all offer a wide range of templates that you can use to design the site. It is a competitive market and because of that, you benefit.

One type of site-builder is housed on the servers of the hosting company. You go to their website, log in to your account and then open the sitebuilder. From there you can "point and click" and "drag and drop" to create your website. All the companies offer a wide range of design tips, tricks and techniques for how to do it so that is not a problem at all. It is very simple.

The downside to this type of site-builder is that because it is housed on the hosting company's servers you must be connected to the internet to use it and if that connection gets slow or broken then you are in trouble. Also because it is remote these types of site-builder tend to be slightly limited in the amount of control you have over what you put on the site, how you put it there and how you want parts of the site to behave.

The other type of site-builder is downloadable and installs on to your computer. These types of site-builder tend to have a wider range of features and offer greater personal control over the site you design. They have the same simple interface as their online counterparts but because they are located on your computer are generally far more advanced.

The downside is that the hosting company offering the software is just not going to give that away for free! The catch is that these sitebuilders will be locked into a hosting deal with the hosting company and will create the site in a format that is only recognized by that company and that software.

Whilst this may seem to be a problem really it is not. Once you build the site and load it on to your hosting space it MUST be converted to the same standard file types as all sites on the internet. From there it is a simple matter if using any one of hundreds of free software that will download your entire site to your computer as a backup.

With a little looking around on the internet you can easily find a hosting deal that is cheap, fits your needs and offers a site-bulider that you feel comfortable with. Try a few out before you commit and avoid any that don't allow a free trial of the software.

A Note on Cheap Hosting

If you take a look around the internet you will notice there are two price ranges for hosting in general at the bottom end of the market where you are. The first will be the US$4.00 to $8.00 market and the next is the $15.00 to $20.00 market.

The cheaper deals are based on the concept of shared hosting. That means that your site is sharing the space with many other sites. For the beginning website the cheaper is fine. If you start to get lots and lots of traffic you can always upgrade because you would be realizing greater income from the site.

The main lesson to learn in this field is to first and foremost try to envision why you want a website. Then, whether for fun or profit go for a free or very cheap, but established, service first. Your first foray into the area may not be the thumping success you imagined but if you learn as you go and get better without the financial pain, you will keep going.

About the Author:
Rob is a long time internet and website enthusiast. Others have referred to Rob as more of a website tragic than anything else however he chooses to rise above such comments.

Make Your Own Website

IMC Bebiz Review



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


Tags: , ,

|

Recent Web-Design Articles

Comments

Still can't find what you are looking for? Search for it!

Loading

Site Navigation:

Copyright 2005-2011 ArticleSnatch, LLC - All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy | Terms of Service.