Saaket Unadkat – Blog

You Can Build A Website Too!

// September 30th, 2009 // My Reviews, TechBytes, Tutorials

Its been 3 months since I bought this domain, and ever since, people around have been asking me, “How do you do all this?” or “How did you do it ?” and the likes. They think it is some herculean task, only worthy of the geeks to achieve. But it isn’t even remotely as complicated as people tend to think of it. So here’s my own nifty little ‘tutorial-y’ post about it.

Everyone I know started their online experiences with websites by staring their very own blog using the numerous services available on the web today, the most popular being Blogger and Wordpress. Just create an account with them and select a theme to suit yourself, and you’re ready to go with your first post. All in a matter of minutes. Sounds simple ? So, why would anyone want to anyone want to take the trouble of setting up their independent site and maintain it ?

Here’s why:

1. If you are planning of starting a website to promote your business, your personal domain lends credibility to it.
2. Using free hosting services may be easy, but you have compromises there too. (eg Ads)
3. Your own, personalised corner on the web. (Now would you want www.yourname.blogspot.com or www.yourname.wordpress.com as your identity?)
4. You have complete control over it.
5. You can make money out of it.   etc etc etc

So now you finally decide to take the plunge. Step 1 would be to register a domain. Simply search for a domain registrar (I use GoDaddy, and they have also partnered with Google to provide you with domains), and type in whatever site name you need, and if available, you have the option to buy it, prices varying according to the domain extension(.com, .net, .in, .org etc) you choose. Most of these domains are automatically registered with the ICANN, which is an organisation that keeps track of the domain names on the internet. Also, I would suggest you keep the domain name as short as possible, for better SEO(Search Engine Optimization). Also, they don’t cost much. Usually around $10 for a year and renewals later.

After this, the next step would be your hosting. Hosting means having a server where your site is physically located/hosted. Again, I frown upon the free hosts as they place ads, or shut down without any notifications. These may be good enough to start upon. Even I did tread upon that path. But when you want to get serious, one shouldn’t rely on them. Getting a dedicated server for you site makes sure that it is running 99% of the time. The server may be in some remote corner of the world, but who cares anyways. Hosting also comes in 2 types: Linux based and Windows based. If you plan on installing applications (such as forums, shopping carts, content management systems etc) on your site, be sure to check if your type of hosting supports it. The costs of hosting can vary from $3-10 per month, based on your plan and hosting provider. Dedicated servers are totally worth the costs in the long run.

So now that you have the domain and a server, you need to get your site up and running. People hire professionals to do this work for them and end up burning a huge hole in their pocket just to get the website made. Now that doesn’t really sound cost effective and I also don’t think its worth your moneys pay.  You can get a professional looking web presence with all the bells and whistles that you may see on other sites without writing even one line of code. Enter CMS, or content management systems. The most commonly used CMS are Joomla and Drupal. Both are available as free installs from your hosting provider. All you have to do it get a theme, write articles, upload your logo, and you are done. Of course there is much more that you can do with them. They have very a very powerful control panel and a plethora of addons and plugins to choose from, to suit your needs. Even the databases are created and managed automatically. Even a basic wordpress install can be modified and used for similar purposes.

Once you explore the possibilities with these apps, you’ll realize eventually how easy to use they are. But, there needs to be a beginning somewhere, and this is it. It cant possibly get any simpler for a lower budget. Web development was never so easy…

Related posts:

1. How And Why I Got The Domain
2. Upgrade/Downgrade to/from iPhone OS 3.0 Final Build
3. Google Chrome OS – My Viewpoint