How to Build Your Own Website

First things first, you need to have an idea of what kind of website you want to build.

Is this is a business website or a personal website?

*If this is a business website will you be using your company name for your domain name?

*If this is a personal website what will be the general idea of the website ex. "all about dogs"

Try to choose a Domain name that is relevant to the theme of your website, or the brand of your business.

For Example domain. com (business brands)

allaboutdogs. com (personal theme)

Do you want a .com, .org, .biz, .info, .us? Often referred to as a TLD (top level domain)

Again there are many options to choose from.

www.GoDaddy.com, when you buy a domain name gives you the option to buy the entire package to ensure that no one else leaches off your brand. If you are branding your business you may want to consider buying all the different domain choices for this reason. If your building your website for personal reasons, you may not need to do this right away unless your website/brand grows and you feel the need. For a list of TLDs and their meanings, and what they are typically used for please see this link. List of Top Level Domains It will help you make an informed decision about which domain to choose.

A while back I decided I wanted to start a website for my business Nifty Thriftys. I searched the domain name, and the .com was taken, but the .org was available so I grabbed it up. I didn't research hosting companies very well, and I don't know why I wanted to stay away from www.GoDaddy.com even though they have the best prices and hosting plans around, but I did. I went with I-Page instead. That was a mistake I am still dealing with to this day.

Its not that I-Page is a bad host, because they are not. You see, I thought that the drag and drop editor they featured was cool. I was a noob, and I really just wanted my website to be up and running as easily and quickly as possible. Not too much to ask for right?

Wrong. I didnt really think about how much control I would lose with a drag and drop editor. It turns out, that while I thought I wanted a drag and drop editor to do it all for me, I really wanted to have more control, and do it myself. For one, I had a little more html knowledge than I had given myself credit for (thank you myspace). But secondly, I wanted to be able to have control of my keywords, meta data, and associated tags. In the Editor that I-Paged offered me, that was something I could not control.

So I messed around with the I-Page editor trying to find a way to control these options, and soon thereafter wound up crashing my site, transferring hosting companies to GoDaddy and parking my domain for 60 days until the transfer is complete. Hard lesson learned. The moral of this story is, please do your research be jumping in with a hosting plan. You really will get what you pay for.

So how do you know which hosting you need? Only you will know. Here are some things to think about when choosing a hosting company.

1) How much sever space do you need? The higher traffic site you have the more server space you will need. Some companies such as I-Page offer unlimited hosting which includes unlimited space, unlimited emails, unlimited pages and more. All for under $75.00 per year.

2)Do you need website design? Things such as the drag and drop editors are available with your hosting company as well. GoDaddy offers a great website creator, Website Tonight, which is just like a drag and drop editor, however, it allows you as much control as you want or need.

3)Do you need free hosting? Try things like WordPress blogs, or Squidoo!! to get you started. I do not recommend free hosting at all, although it is available. Please search and utilize this at your own risk.

If you would like a more in depth review of hosting companies, Check out this link to Reviewing The Ten Best Web Hosts of 2010

Think of a website like an asset, as it actually is an asset. Eventually it will have a value, so treat it as though it is valuable.

The next step is to buy your domain name from your hosting company and register it. If you do end up going with a company like GoDaddy, then they can do both parts of this step for you.

Finally, after hours, and possibly days of research, you are ready to move on to designing your first website. Now I will begin by saying I am not a web designer, nor am I going to try to be one. I will admit that I use a website editor. Specifically Website tonight by GoDaddy. It allows me the function to not hand code things as well as premade layouts to apply to each individual page as I see fit, while it also allows me to get into the heart of the html and edit if I need to.

Basically there are three ways to design your website.

1) Premade Templates or WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) Editors. Basically, you tell the site generally what you want, and they provide you with what you generally need. You are allowed very limited access to edit your html in this format.

2) HTML Editor such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage. These programs allow you to create websites using their software and help with coding and then you have to upload it to your domain and hosting company in order to publish it to the web. I am unfamiliar with this process, as it is for advanced users.

3) Hand Coding. This is the expert way of coding a website. If you are reading this site, it is probably something that you don't want to consider, as it is for advanced users.

This being said there several main components to a web page, just as there would be with a well written presentation or report.

I like to think of each of my web pages as individual projects or reports. This helps me keep the topic at hand organized and easy to read.

There are several important components to keep in mind when building your website. What seems like minor things actually make a huge impact on your search engine ratings.

1) Title - Your title is what will show up at the top of a web search, or the heading. This must be catchy, but also relevant to your content.

2)Description Metatag- This is what shows up underneath the heading, which tells reader what your webpage is about. This obviously needs to be relevant to your content so that you attract your targeted traffic. Search engines will use this at some point when looking at your site for indexing. Try to keep it to a maximum of 150 characters if possible which describe the content of each page as closely as possible. If it is written well enough, it may also help boost the number of visitors onto your site, so try and get creative with it.

3) Main Header- This can go below the navigation bar, It basically tells what the focus of that page is.

4) Body- This is the content of your webpage. There are many things that you will need to have in this area.

a) Relevant content. It is important for every website to be based around valuable relevant content in the area that your website is focused on. Search engines do care about your content and they apparently can tell if your content is just duplicated from other websites.

b) Links- Links are important in every aspect that you look at them. In text links that lead to other parts of your website are very good. Links that lead out to other websites that are also in the same general field as you are also good. Links from other sites that lead to your site are the best. These however, are the hardest links to obtain and I will talk about this later on.

c) Graphics- Everyone loves pictures! The name and description of your picture is also relevant to your webpage. When someone performs a Google search on your keyword, Google not only searches the text information of websites, but the graphics as well. Google cannot find your picture if it is named as a number, or something totally irrelevant to the content of the picture. If you want to add a picture of people on your site, and the pictures name is "10200a.jpg" then it probably will not show up in the search results. But if you name the picture something such as "happy customers" (or whatever your keyword may be) your image is way more likely to come up in the results. That way when someone is searching for the keywords that are relevant to your site, your relevant pictures will pop up leading to more traffic to your site.

d) Social Media Add Buttons- Do not underestimate the power of social media. In the future it will be your best friend. This is a great way to build readers as well as connect in many different markets and deliver your product and updates almost instantaneously to your target traffic. Add the buttons, so your viewers will add you!

e) Contact Information and Forms- It is important to have your contact information listed somewhere for your interested viewers. It is also equally important for your to collect contact information from your viewers. That makes it important to include some sort of form to collect data, sign up for newsletters, or something that begins correspondence with the viewer, and gains their loyalty while branding your business.

5) Footer. This is a good place to repeat site navigation and links as well as say goodbye to viewers.

Well folks, for me this was the easy part. If you chose to use a drag and drop editor through your hosting company, this step will be as easy as pressing the "Publish" button.

However, if you chose to build your site through a program such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage , you will have to upload your page to the root directory of your website through your hosting company in order to publish. Sounds a little difficult, but it shouldn't be that bad.

1) Just simply go to your hosting company's web site and log in.

2) Search the help topics for "How to Upload my Site for Publishing" and follow the directions that should be listed.

OR - If that does not work, I suggest calling them and asking them to walk you through it. Any good hosting company will be more than happy to assist you through the process. That is what you paid them for.

So what comes after publishing? Well, you are going to want to get your website added to directories and search engines if you want to be found. This is where the concept of "Search Engine Optimization, Marketing and Promotion" comes in. Like any brick and mortar business, you have to get the word out about your site, before the people will come. How do you do this you ask? There are countless ways to do this in fact, some more successful than others. Since this is a whole different lens in itself I will keep it brief.

Search Engine Optimization- The process of optimizing your site for maximum crawl exposure and web traffic. This includes utilizing the proper keywords and meta data in your site. If you followed the directions outlined above, your content should be solid and keyword focused naturally.

Try using this Adwords Keyword Tool to find out what the main keywords are in your site.

1) Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2) Read the information at the top under Keyword Tool

3) Click on the "results tailored to" link and click on "All Countries and Territories"

4) Directly below this click on the "How would you like to generate keyword ideas?"

5)To the right there should be a box to type in your URL for your website. This should begin with the http:// tag followed by your domain name to the page you would like to evaluate.

6) Click the "Get Keyword Ideas" Button. This will query for a few seconds and then display the relevant keyword information below.

Its hard to choose which keywords you would like to use, but you can start by evaluating how much traffic each keyword gets compared to how many sites on google there are for that keyword. If there is a high amount of traffic that probably means that your brand new site will not show up in that search yet, due to all the competition of the keyword. Try targeting keywords that still have a good amount of traffic, but are not too competitive, and still relevant to your content and target viewers.

Search Engine Marketing and Promotion- This is basically, the act of optimizing your site for adds too promote and get more traffic, as well as selling your own ad space, on your own websites, targeting your own content, for profit.

Social Media Marketing- Relatively new marketing strategy that utilizes the ever expanding social media platforms to deliver and promote the contents of your site to the general public.