Starting your own Website

If you are a regular user of the internet and have decided it is time to build your own presence online then we will show you how you can achieve this. This tutorial will guide you through finding a webhost, choosing a domain name, uploading a content management system or blog, forum and more. Following this tutorial we will then cover what you need to do to set up an online store and handle transactions in a secure way.

Choosing a Domain Name

When you decide it is time to start running your own website you need to decide if you want your own domain (www.domain.com) or one part of another company available from Blogspot for example. Also you need to choose where the website will be hosted. I always recommend buying a domain name and some good hosting which sounds expensive, but is actually not. For domain names I use GoDaddy for .com domains and UKReg for .co.uk domain names. At GoDaddy you can expect to pay around $8 - $9 per year to own a .com domain name and about £6 for 2 years for a .co.uk domain name. Once you have decided a domain name it is time to find somewhere to host it. Ideally you want to host the domain on a server in the country where you expect to be receiving most traffic from. For the TechAsis site I get most traffic from the US followed by the UK, so choosing a server in the US was what I have done. If I were to expect more traffic from the UK then I would choose somewhere like FastHosts who offer a nice amount of disk space and transfer for a good price. I have been using FastHosts since 2001 without too many problems. Just make sure that when choosing your host you already know what you want to run on there. If you decide wordpress is for you then the host will need to support PHP and MySQL. A linux based server would probably be more ideal for you.

What Next?

Now that you have a domain name and hosting this makes your domain safe and your name established. Just make sure you remember to renew your domain in a years time. The next step now is to decide what you want to run on your website. Luckily, these days web design and web page development does not need to be a huge process for a personal site. There are countless numbers of free software packages and designs available to get you a decent and fully functional website on line in which you can blog, discuss or sell items from.

Choosing Software

Blogs - A blog is a website which acts like a journal or news reporting site. When creating a blog you post your opinions, or news items and the blog software posts the entries in chronological order. Blogs can be very popular and range from having just a few visitors per month to millions of visitors per month. Software such as WordPress is quick and easy to install and is very customisable by using plugins and a number of free themes can be uploaded to change the layout quickly. The best part is that WordPress and many of the designs and plugins are completly free.

CMS (Content Management System) - A CMS is another option which I like. Joomla is free and fairly easy to use. The design of a site can be purchased for around $30, although there are many free designs available. A CMS allows you to create the menus, subjects, sections and re order everything how you like it. When writing content you just log in to an admin section, click new content, select a few options, write away and then publish the article. Joomla takes care of the rest and allows you to concentrate on the content rather then how it all works in the background.

Forums - Forums are used as great discussion tools and can be used as a complete website, or as part of a website for providing support or discussion on a particular topic. Forum software can either be free or paid with some very good solutions in both areas. If you want to go for the best around then vBulletin would be considered by many to fall in to that place. It costs around $160 for an owned licence with a yearly fee to keep the version current and bug free. Other options are phpBB , Snitz and SMF . As with all software that is available (free or paid) you need to make sure you keep them up todate. This isnt a daunting task and usually means just uploading the new version to your server and following the instructions which tell you how to run the upgrade scripts.

Shopping Sites - You may want to sell tangible items over the internet rather then run a discussion forum, blog or CMS. A shopping cart is an application which allows you to upload images of products, set the price and run your own online store. Popular shopping carts are CubeCart , osCommerce and CandyPress which are fully customisable. As with forums and other types of sites, you can also mix and match various types of sites together. One example is that you might sell a particular product like Telephones. You could attach a forum to the same domain at www.domain.com/forum and have this section of the site provide the technical support of your online store. Customers could ask for quotes, support and recommend products etc… Websites are very flexible and if you want to do something new then just upload it, try it and see how it goes.

WebSite Backups

Which ever type of site you decide to create, always make sure you keep regular backups because if a database gets corrupt or the site gets hacked then you need to quickly restore it. You can never rely 100% on any host to restore your data. I have seen a lot of people complain over the years that they had a huge popular site, the host went down temporarily, their database was corrupt and the hosts backup was corrupt. Just so you never experience the loss of all your hard work make sure you back up regularly.

How to get your site Online

Now that you have a domain and have chosen what type of site you want to use you need to download the software you want to use from their website and once downloaded, open up the readme file and full instructions will be available to help you upload the site. Uploads are done via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). You can use the built in Windows Explorer to FTP files or download an FTP client. I personally just use the free one built in to Windows although it is a little quirky sometimes and drops connections. FTP works in Windows in a similar way to copying and pasting a file or folder. When you log on to your web hosts FTP service you will see various folders. Look out for one named public_html or wwwroot for example. This is the folder which you will want to upload the files to. Uploading files and folders to this location will then make them available online at www.yourdomain.com.