How To Build A Website

Whichever way you decide to go you're going to need a domain so you have a website address and a server hosting package to store all your pages on. These are unavoidable expenses which every website owner has to pay for because without them know one will be able to see your website.

As far as hosting goes you can always buy your own server but it will cost you a lot more money and you will have to know something about servers to be able to manage them correctly. This is where a server hosting company comes in. When you get hosting you can either go for shared hosting, reseller hosting, virtual private server hosting or dedicated server hosting.

The big difference between each type of hosting is the number of accounts on each server. On a shared account you will have many thousands of accounts on one server where as with a dedicated server only one account holder has access. Which hosting package you pick really depends on how many visitors you expect to get. The more visitors you get the more bandwidth you will use up but for the most part, if you are just starting out you should go for the basic package. You can always upgrade your account at a later date with relative ease and by doing it this way you won't waste too much money.

You can pay for your server hosting either monthly or upfront in six and 12 month installments. You usually get a discount for advanced purchase but every company is different. Many offer big discounts for the first 1 to 3 months so it's worth shopping around.

A big advantage to using a web host over buying your own server is the support and maintenance which is all included on most hosting accounts. If you opt for a higher level account such as a dedicated server, make sure that you're paying for the fully managed service otherwise you could end up with a lot of headaches down the road. Besides most people have enough on their plate with building and promoting websites without having to deal with server side issues.

The other advantage to having a hosting account is that all the software programs are already installed on the server, including the user interface which is usually the ever popular cpanel or plesk.

So buying a domain and getting server hosting are the two main expenses you have no choice but to pay for where as other things you can do yourself at no cost or you can hire someone else to do it for you. One example of this could be that you need some graphics made for the site such as a header graphic, a product graphic or perhaps some icons. If you're proficient in using a graphics package like photoshop you can certain save some money. Whatever build type you use you are going to need to either create all the graphic elements from scratch or alter the template you're using to fit in with what the site is about.

Another element you have to take into consideration is the content of the website. Will you be writing all the content yourself or hiring someone else to do it for you. Again, it all really depends on how much time and money you intend to spend on building the website.

There are lots of web design companies who charge an arm and a leg to get your site built and it could cost you thousands of dollars by the time they have finished but it doesn't have to be this way. There are now quite a number of popular outsource sites where you can get just about anything you want and it doesn't cost nearly as much. The outsource sites are full of freelance professionals who bid on projects. So if you need to get a task done such as the creation of some graphics you can use an outsource site. Popular outsource sites include, Elance, Guru.com, Odesk.com and Freelancer.com to name a few. It's amazing what you can actually get done to the point where you could hire someone else to even set up your domain and server hosting for you.

Now it's okay to know that you need a site builder, a domain, a server hosting account, some graphics and content but the truth is that it's a complete waste of time building anything unless you have a good plan laid out beforehand. You need to know what the intention of your site will be and roughly what pages you will be building. An easy way to go about this is to do some research first by finding similiar sites to the one you want to build.

Just go to Alexa.com and type in a keyword relating to your niche such as dentist. Alexa will not only show you a list of related dental sites but will also provide the traffic rankings of each website. This is a golden opportunity for you to investigate which websites are doing well and how they are achieving their success. This will give you lots of ideas for your own website and you will know what kind of pages you need to build and roughly how many. It's a good way to lay out a rough sitemap so you know what needs to be done to get your website off the ground and ranking in the search engines with your competitors.

One final point on the subject is to not forget about keyword research. Always make sure you do some keyword research beforehand as well otherwise you may end up building a website that is optimized for terms that know one ever types into the search engine or the terms are so competitive that you struggle to ever get onto the first page of google.