How to Build a Website

Websites are designed for a variety of personal and business reasons. A personal website is a place for the designer’s friends and family to look at pictures of their cat, a new baby, a new house, or whatever may be of interest to the site’s visitors. Professionally speaking, websites are an excellent tool to promote a business or service and provide information about a company. Whatever the reason, learning how to build a website may seem overwhelming but most anyone can learn.

To start, you will need access to a computer and basic computer skills. You will also need an HTML editor, which is a web page construction tool and is available either in software packages or for free online. The last thing you will need is a web server, or simply put, a place to publish your website. Some servers will provide access to their construction tools to help you build your site.

Learning how to build a website can be a fun experience if you’re willing to take the time to learn and have a good reason for creating one. Determine your objective for designing a website and decide what you want to put on each page. The home page is the primary page of any site and is the first page viewers will find. When designing it, think of it like the cover of a book. The home page can exist all by itself or you can include other pages in your site. You can add pictures, sound, and text to your page as desired, but keep in mind that graphics take longer to load and so you may not want to inconvenience visitors with a page that takes all day to download.

The HTML editor is necessary because it translates everything you want on your site into a language that the hosting computer will understand. An HTML editor will assist you in building the pages of your site and will allow most any file to be used.

Once you’ve built, or in other words designed, your website, you will need a host. This is where your page is essentially stored in order to be viewed online by everyone else. Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer free hosting in exchange for placing banners or sponsor ads on your site. Because they are free, it’s a nice tool to start learning how to build a website, but is not very professional and can be annoying for even casual viewers. Professional hosting services will vary in price and servers may charge monthly and others annually. If you are building a website for business or professional use, it’s worth the minimal investment to have a professional web host.