How To Set Up A Website From Scratch.

In order to set up your own website, first you need to have some idea about what you intend your site to be about. Make sure that you know what the main idea behind the site is going to be, what information you are going to put on it, whether it is going to be personal, informative or commercial, how you will develop it or get it developed, and finally, why you are building the site in the first place.

After you have gotten your ideas straightened out, it is time to identify your target audience. Decide whether you want your site to target only a specific group of people or the public in general. Then you have to figure out how much time and money you intend to spend behind the development of the site. If you are developing a personal site without aiming for any financial gain, you can easily use a free hosting service and get away with infrequent site maintenance.

Content-oriented sites are cheap to start, but since it is possible for anyone to start one, there is heavy competition. If you plan to stand out from the crowd, make sure your content is good enough to ensure that. You can provide the information and earn money from the traffic received through onsite advertising.

E-commerce sites require much more regular attention as well as maintenance. Various factors such as product shipping, sales tax, security of order forms, inventory updates also have to be taken into account, because managing an online storefront is not all that different from offline ones.

Now, go back to the list of ideas you prepared at the beginning. Narrow down the list, keeping only the ideas which appeal to you the most in terms of passion, practicality, and in case of commercial sites, profit.

The next step is pretty easy - get a domain name registered, preferably one that is easy to remember and hard to get muddled. That should make things a lot easier for your potential visitors. Following this, you have to choose a web host. For small-scale projects, a free web hosting service should prove to be more than adequate, but prepare to pay for extra storage and bandwidth if you are building a complicated website. Free web hosts often have a tendency to stick their own advertisements all over your precious web pages, but there are certain hosts who let you have many privileges without having to deal with such atrocities. Just make sure that you go through the feature list of the available hosts thoroughly when registering.

Now it is time to finally start building your website. This part can be highly enjoyable, or a complete nightmare (depending on how skilled you are). So, if you do not feel up to it, make sure you have someone handy nearby to help you out. You can get hold of a website-building program and build your site yourself. You can also learn a programming language like HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, PHP or Python or XML (learning more than one would be even more helpful). However, if you do not feel that you are capable of that, or are heavily pressed for time, feel free to hire a professional developer. In fact, if you intend to develop complex sites such as e-commerce sites, this is the only option which you should consider.

Make sure that you use keywords ('tags') liberally in the text portions of your site, as long as they do not get in the way of the actual content. Make sure that the site title and descriptions also carry keywords. And, in order to make a good impression on your audience, be meticulously accurate about the spelling and grammar of what you write. The little details are often the things that end up making the most difference.

When designing, try your best to keep things simple and easy to understand. Nothing drives most visitors away faster than complicated site designs. On the WWW, minimalism is one of the best practices ever. Every step you take to keep your design simple and easier to understand is a step toward making things better for your visitors.

When you are done with making the site, it is time to upload it to your host's server. Depending on your host, you may have access to a dedicated FTP feature, or you can simply get yourself a suitable FTP program. While commercial programs such as CuteFTP are good, there are lots of good freeware FTP programs out there which can easily give their commercial counterparts a run for their money. If you are not willing to download an entire program for FTP, you can even use the tiny and extremely handy FireFTP extension for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. It has all the features you can ask for, and then some.

Now what you have to do is advertise your site. Submit information on the site to all major search engines for listing. Be sure to tell your friends about it. Spamming is annoying, so it is not recommended to be a part of your publicity campaign. Use an email address sporting your domain name - that should spark a bit of attention too. Affiliating with other websites is a good way to spread your site's name far and wide. Another great way to publicize is to post/comment on blogs and online forums, where you can simply carry your site URL as your signature.

The final step is the most important - make sure that the content and service you are providing is of high quality. Take the feedback you get from people seriously, and do not be afraid of getting flamed. Pay heed to people's constructive comments, and always remember that no matter how good your site is, it can always be made better. Always keep the needs, weaknesses and shortcomings of your target market when designing your services, and always seek to help them. A win-win situation should exist between you and your site visitors.

Have fun designing your own site!