Website

Why build a website?

Why consider building a website? People have different motivations, for building a website. There are personal websites, such as sharing family photos and memories. Then there are business websites, money-making websites, and retail business websites.

Websites are no longer just for computer geeks and big business. You may be looking to market your business, share ideas with fellow hobbyists, or putting your family happenings on-line, you can do these with a website.

Can a "Computer Novice" build a website?

Typically, most web builders have a lot of education on HTML, CSS, Visual Basic, Java, script building, etc. This scares Computer Novices off, because they think all that is necessary! But an untrained "Computer Novice" can do it as well!

How? My neighbor wanted to build one for our Neighborhood association, and chose to use the Goggle Free website services, and he built a pretty nice website, with no computer education at all! See Longhill Gate Homeowners Association as an example.

He did this in 4 hours, at almost no cost! To look at doing this yourself go to

Google - Website Building.

It is relatively easy, and certainly low cost!

Note: I chose SBI (Site Build It), which allows me to use simple (yet very powerful) tools to build my website. For more see SBI (Site Build It). This is the best method, for builing a powerful website, with a lot of tools, instruction and guidance.

In the image above, Websites for Dummies - is actually worth reading!

There are other methods out there, but beware! There are a lot of offers that look good, that frankly are a possible rip-off!

What is in a Website Name?

Picking a good name for your website, will affect how people find you with the search engines. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and other search engines provide people a way of finding "stuff" on the web. Your website name will strongly influence whether or not someone will find your website.

If you need to be found (may strongly affect you revenue!) Then spend a lot of time picking your name. When I started with SBI, they emphasized this point heavily, and also gave great ideas for picking a name.

If you are just building a site for your family, then you don't really care if anyone else can "search the web" and find your website. But, if you are doing this for a business, then it matters a lot!

How to Build a Website

Step 1 - Hosting:

Hosting is where you put your website and all the Web pages. If you are building a website on your personal computer and never move it online, no one but you will ever be able to see it. So sooner or later, you'll want to do is find a Web hosting provider.

Step 2 - Do You Need a Domain Name?:

You don't need a domain name to put up a website. You can put up a site on free hosting or even paid hosting plans without a domain name. A domain name provides extra branding for your site and makes it easier for people to remember the URL. But domain names cost money, typically between $8 and $35 a year.

Step 3 - Plan Your Website:

Once you've gotten a domain and decided on your URL, you can start planning your site. You need to decide:

• Type of site - Most websites are either news/information, product, or reference sites. As such they each have a slightly different focus.
• Navigation - The navigation affects the information architecture of your site. (This is fairly understandable, if you use SBI, as they have excellent lessons on this area.)
• - Content is the actual pages you'll be building.

If you can recognize page types, you'll be able to recognize what types of pages you need for your site. Play the Web Page Types game.

Step 4 - Build Your Website Page by Page:

This is actually the hard part. You can add pages, and then organize and reorganize. But it would be better if you had a good layout in mind to begin with.

But in any case, you should continue to build content, continuously.

For more on website building see: Building a Website