How To Build A Website From Scratch

What are you building your website for? Are you building it for your business, your favorite computer game, or your favorite animal? Whatever your purpose or reason is, it is important why you want to build your website. If you build it for business (think money!), your website structure might be catered for "conversions" to make a sale, or to cater for paid advertisements to be placed on your site. If it is a fan page-like style, then it might be more focused on good user experience, like building a flash website (which is less ideal for a business website as search engines have a hard time scanning flash-based websites).

Who is your target reader? Is your website targeted for kids to browse? For adults and grown ups? What are their interests? What are your readers' main concern? You will NEED to address the main concern to be effective in pleasing your website visitors. It doesn't matter whether you are trying to make a sale or not. Website visitors visit your website for a purpose and they want that purpose fulfilled. As a webmaster, this is your primary job -- to fulfill the purpose of target readers' in their course of visit!

Websites will definitely look boring without creativity! Think themes. Dark style? Light Style? Or do you already have a style in mind? If that is so, excellent! You can skip this step. If not, you might want to take a look at other websites on the internet that is of similar type to your website in mind. Lets say you wanted to put up a website on hamsters, then here's what you do:

1. Go to google.com
2. Type "hamster care" and press "Enter"
3. Select and click any result that doesn't have a "Sponsored Results" or "Google Ads" tag on them.
4. After entering the selected website, take a look at the website theme.

Is that the theme you wanted? Keep repeating this process until you found some similar to what you have in mind for your website. Bookmark the page so you can refer back to it conveniently later, especially when you start building your website.

What's a website without great content?! An empty website? There are two ways to this; either you have the knowledge of the topic concerned to write out the original content itself (which is what I am doing right now) or you are holding on to some content written by a friend or even a hired writer perhaps. Whichever the way, you will definitely need content to build your website from scratch. A website without content isn't a website!

Now that you have most of the stuff above, you will now need something to actually build a website from scratch. There are two ways to go about doing this: Notepad Application in your PC or a HTML Editor. Building a website from notepad itself is a very raw process as you have to manually type out the entire website page code (known as HTML) all by yourself! Seeing that it is such a technically-challenging process, if you knew how to, you might not be here! So I won't be covering on that in this article. Instead, lets talk about HTML Editors.

HTML Editors are software that helps you build a website page easily. And HTML is the "language" the internet uses to display and present website pages to you, so this have to be done properly. There are two kinds of software out there: free and paid. I'm sure many of you already know that. For a paid HTML Editor, I recommend getting Adobe Dreamweaver. These guys in Adobe do such an excellent job making such an awesome software for website building productivity. However, Adobe Dreamweaver comes with a heavy cost. For the less-budgeted folks out there who are still willing to pay, another great HTML Editor is by CoffeeCup. Search "CoffeeCup HTML Editor" in Google and you will find within the top few search results. Do remember to get the visual version of the HTML Editor though! The free version of the CoffeeCup HTML Editor doesn't come with the visual function and will require you to meddle with HTML code itself!

As for the free ones, try searching in Google for "NVU" or "KompoZer". These are the best free HTML Editors out there you can use. (:

FTP clients are software that helps you transfer your website files to and fro between your computer and the web host (which helps you to make your website visible on the internet to everyone in the world). Most HTML Editors (as described above) come with a built-in FTP client. However, if yours do not come with one, you can get one for free. Try searching in Google for "FileZilla".

Alright, now for a place for your pages to sit in! A web host is a company that acts as a "host" (think host and guests!) for your website files to be placed in. What is important is also the reliability of the company and cost-effective "packages" they can offer you. There are several factors you will need to consider when getting one. Here's a quick list:

Look for a "package" or "plan" they offer that consists of:

- Ample storage space for your needs (so you have enough space for all your website files)
- Sufficient bandwidth (it's somewhat similar in theory to the "call time" you clock when talking on the mobile phone!)
- 24/7 support (what if you get stuck or face some problems in the middle of the night?!)
- Easy-to-use control panel (this control panel refers to the user-interactive page in your administrative section when you log in to your web host)
- Good uptime rates (think "reliability"! you don't want your websites to be malfunctioning every other day!)

For a good and cheap web host that meets or EXCEEDS all the above factors, I recommend HostGator. You can click here to check it out.

Ok now you have everything you need for a functioning website but it's sad to have a website with anyone actually visiting it! There are tons of way you can bring visitor traffic to your new website. You bring website visitors from search engines (like Google and Yahoo), paid advertising, word of mouth, social networking, and perhaps much more that I can't seem to think right now! But for now, I will talk about social networking, as this is probably the easier yet more effective way of promoting visitor traffic to your website!

For Facebook users, you can grab the link of your website and post it in your status as a status update of a link! Isn't that easy?! "Like" the link as well as think might induce more people to "Like" your link, which in turn makes your link even more popular! That will give you visitor traffic. For Twitter users, it's pretty much similar too -- you tweet about it. (: