When I first started working online, one of the first questions that came to mind was – how do I build a website? I believe lots of other people perhaps you too was in the same predicament.

Another question was – how to build a professional looking website.

And...next question was, how to attract lots of visitors to my site?

Well, after some dabbling in the beginning, I slowly picked up all the skills required to build websites and keeping them in working order.

Yes, I understand building & establishing a professional web presence is quite a daunting task for the uninitiated. Just thinking about the HTML, CSS, Graphic Design & all of the other skills that are needed can be overwhelming.

However the good news is - it is really possible to establish a professional website without having to spend huge sums of money on web design fees, expensive software packages, programming manuals or web hosting services. Adding to that, many of the tools & resources that you will require to build your website are highly affordable, if not totally free.

In the steps below I laid out all necessary resources that you need to put in place for creating, publishing and maintaining a successful website. This only serves as an introduction so follow through the linked articles for more info and details.

Step 1 | Define Your Website's Goals & Theme

While many guides let you started with choosing a domain name first, I recommend a different strategy. I believe building a website or a blog is not all about domain name. It starts with your goals or what you want to achieve by having one to call your own.

The objectives for your website will drive the content and the design whether it's just a hobby or promoting a business.

Some of the things you need to consider are the following;

• The topic of your website - Many websites are either news/information, product, or reference sites
• Content - Content is the actual text and other media of your website's subject you'll be presenting
• Navigation - The navigation affects the information architecture of your site
• Colors - The combination of the colors throughout your website need to complement each other and will enhance the message you want to deliver across
• Graphics - Consider the design of logos & corporate branding that may be needed for your site

It is useful if you align all the points above and blend them into a unique theme to present to the visitors of your site. That could make a lasting impression to them and help in making your site more ‘stickier’.

Step 2 | Naming Your Site - Get a Domain Name

It is possible to get a free domain name with a free web hosting provider. However, this type of domain would look something like this - your-site.wordpress.com or your-site.blogspot.com.

And the good thing is – your site will get indexed and ranked fast since many of these services are popular with search engines. Blogspot.com or Blogger.com is even owned by Google so it’s not surprising if it gets special treatment by the big G. Also, you save yourself from forking out money to pay for web hosting and maintaining it - which can be a great deal to some. 

While free is good, it may not help in term of integrity & branding of your web site in the long run. Having said that, there are many popular websites are also run on these free platforms. So you need to carefully matching this with all your other needs and goals.

If you have to go for the free domain route, it’s good to do it with an anticipation of going for your own domain name later in the future. This includes choosing a platform that allows you to easily transfer your website or blog contents to a new system as you may want to keep the contents and not wasting it.

Step 3 | Getting A Space For Your Site on the Net - Web Hosting

What do you need Web Hosting for, you may ask?

Well, imagine this. The contents of your website need to reside on a machine for other people to access and interact with. That machine called web server can be your own or rented from someone else for reasons such as:

• Available to any web surfer on the world wide web for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year so it has to be connected to the internet at all times
• Downtime has to be minimal or risk losing your visitors
• Has to support a range of web technologies
• Securely protected from many different threats such as virus, worms, DOS so on

So for these factors, running your own server may not be the best choice therefore most people will just rent it out from companies that provide the service. And the most popular service is called shared hosting where many users (usually thousands) will share a web server and pay a small fraction of what they would pay for a dedicated machine.

There are free web server providers out there on the net but I have heard too much of bad experiences to recommend it to you. I even tried it myself and it may not be worthwhile going for free webhosting.

There are generally significant amounts of downtime, limited support & other restrictions on server space & bandwidth. The service can be so bad because all the provider want was to get you upgrade to their paid hosting service. So why bother trying free account while you may end up paying anyway.

Now, be it paid or free services – pay attention to the small prints in your contract. I observed the practice of these companies putting on advertisement what they think are their strengths and keeping those restriction clauses in the actual agreement. Typically what advertised as “Unlimited” this and that may not be so at the end of the day.

Getting a good web host is quite challenging. Personally, I have been changing my provider on average once a year. The biggest issues so far were downtime, slow access time, limited disk space and bad user interface. In each case, the pricing was not an issue as they were all comparable with each other.

Read on if you want to know of a few of web hosts that I used and personally recommending it.