How to Make the Website

Having a domain name is the easiest step. Just think of what you want people to type in their browsers in order to find you. Then pick the available extension. For having more chances of being seen by Internet surfers searching for relevant terms to your website you will want to stick to .com extension. If not you can go for a .net or .org if appropriate. Other than that your job in getting your site to be "respected" by search engines will be harder.

If, however, you don't care about it that much ... say you want a personal website and don't want to spend too much time searching for a domain name with a .com extension, then pick any available extension.

As I am writing this lens there is a special offer on .info domains by most domain registration services. My favorite is namecheap, but you can also go for Go Daddy if you want as long as you are not going to use your website for a business.

Before you go ahead and buy a domain please read the whole lens first, because you can get a free domain with most hosting services as you'll see

The other part of your website is, well ..., the website itself; the content of your website. This includes all kinds of files that you want people to see when they visit your website.

Building the pages, connecting them together, uploading photos and the graphics, and any downloadable material that you want available to your visitors (and you have the right to do so) are all supposed to be stored on a computer that is connected to the Internet 24/7 with a special type of operating system.

This machine that carries your files is called a "server", which is structured in a way that makes it tolerate the data transfer to and from it without crashing, freezing, or showing any errors. There is a server technician who is monitoring the server activity just in case any thing goes wrong.

Your files can be built on your computer using a special type of software called an "html editor". Examples of html editors are Microsoft Front Page and Dream Weaver. You have to pay for either one (dream weaver has a 30 day trial version). There are free html editors and once you are used to them they are as easy as any of the above. Just make sure you get a "WYSIWYG" type of html editors (it means: what you see is what you get).

That's for Windows and Mac users. For Linux users (I don't think there are any on this lens :-)) there are free html editors that come with any Linux distribution.

I am not going to expand on this because there is a free alternative that's very efficient and comes with most hosting packages

As you must have realized from the above section, you can not store your website files on your personal computer. There are companies specialized on hosting your files for you for a monthly or annual fee. There are free hosting services, but you want to stay away from those as they are here today and gone with your website tomorrow.

Besides reliability, paid hosting is not that expensive. You can get an unlimited hosting right now for $1.99/month and get a FREE domain for the first year on it (that's why I told you to wait until you finish the lens before you go and buy a domain).

Unlimited hosting means you can host as many domains, websites, blogs, files of any kind as you want. It also means you can have as much traffic on your websites as you want. Normally hosting companies set limits on your storage space and data transfer (aka bandwidth), but as I just said the competition is the consumer's best friend.

Best of all, most hosting companies now offer a FREE website builder to build and edit your website with a few clicks of your mouse. That's why I didn't need to elaborate on how to use html editors above.

So for $1.99/month you get a domain name (usually costs ~ $10/year), a free website builder (~$400 until another version comes up), and unlimited storage and bandwidth.

You also get unlimited number of email accounts on your domain. Imagine giving your email address to your friends and family as your first name@your own domain.com.