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Ten Steps to Creating
your First Website:
March 30th, 2009 . by Hosting Ref
If you want to publish a web site and you don’t know anything
about web hosting, it can be very frustrating. Even though web hosting companies
try to make publishing a web site as simple as possible, it is very easy to get
lost in the world of point-and-click low cost web hosting if you don’t know
what you are doing. You may even have already gone to some cheap web hosting
companies and started to sign up for hosting plan, but hesitated because you
weren’t quite sure where to go once you gave them your credit card. However,
if you are new to web hosting and want to create your first website, here are
ten simple steps that you can follow in order to accomplish this:
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Decide on a Product or a Message That You Want to
Sell or Distribute: People publish web sites for many different
reasons, but what is yours? Are you selling a product, putting up personal
pages, or sending out a message on behalf of a charity? Whatever the reason,
you need to be clear about exactly what it is you want to accomplish and
what is different about your site that offers something that people can’t
get anywhere else. For example, if you want to sell a product like silver
jewelry, there are thousands of websites that also sell it. There is stiff
competition for every product that is out there, and you have to decide what
makes your product so special that customers will choose to buy from your
online store over everyone else’s.
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Check Out the Competition: Once you decided
on a product to sell on your website (in this case we’ll stick with silver
jewelry), and you’ve decided what is different about it (you custom design
it yourself), then it’s time to take a look at who else is selling
custom-made silver jewelry. You do this simply by typing key words into one
of the search engines that have to do with custom-made silver jewelry and
see what you find. If you notice, there are going to be a list of the top
ten ranked sites that come up on the page, but then there are probably about
40 pages of web sites after that. This is pretty tough competition. Now is
the time that you are going to have to go through every site and look at
what they are selling and ask yourself some questions like: What kind of
products do they have? What are their price points? What is their return
policy? How much is shipping? What kind of payments do they take? Do they
have a toll-free phone number? How is their site set up? What kind of
outbound links do they have? Etc, etc, etc.
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Design Your Site on Paper: If you don’t
know anything about web site design, that’s okay. Since web sites are
organized by pages, we’re going to start designing yours with pages as
well. Simply take as many sheets of paper as you want your website to be and
make each sheet a page on your web site. Set up each page as a mock-up of
what it will look like when it will be published on the Internet. Include
elements like your logo, any artwork, products shots, product descriptions,
any text or other content, links, a shopping cart, drop down menus, active
buttons, or any other technical elements that will be part of your site. If
you lay your pages out on a table or put them up on the wall, you can get an
overall picture of what your site look like and how a visitor might get
around it.
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Research Keywords: You should have a pretty
good idea of what your site looks like by now, but how are people going to
find it on the Internet? If you think back to when you checked out the
competition in step #2, you remember that you found their sites by looking
up key words. Well, that’s exactly how they are going to find you. So, at
this point, you need to come up with some keywords that people will put into
the search engines so that your site will come up in their search. There are
some free web sites that offer information on keywords and their popularity
that will help you pick key words. However, you want to pick as many
keywords that you can rank for as opposed to popular key words that everyone
tries to get. In the case of ‘silver jewelry,’ you might want to try
ranking for something more specific like ‘custom made silver jewelry’ or
‘southwest silver jewelry’ where the competition isn’t a s great; this
is as opposed to just plain ‘silver jewelry’ where the thousands of
people will be competing against you.
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Generate Content Including Images and Text:
Now that you have keywords, and you also have your web pages layout, it is
time to generate some content. Content on your web site means having more
than just pictures and descriptions of the product. If you notice when you
do a keyword search, there are always what are called ‘sponsored
results.’ These are the websites who pay for rankings. They use different
methods, but unless you have a lot of cash, you will have to get your
ranking organically, or by generating content with keywords that potential
customers can find in a keyword search. Content can be articles about your
product, company, mission, or organization that contain your keywords. Some
of the articles can appear on your web site, and some will appear on other
sites, with links back to your site. Don’t get too worried about content
yet, just have your keywords ready, and some ideas that you can write about
when you are ready.
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Pick a Domain Name: Now that you have
keywords, and your ideas for your site are much more concrete and written
out on paper, you are ready to pick a domain name. A domain name should be
easy to remember, easy to spell, and have something to do with your product
and your keywords. Keep in mind that picking out a clever name is not
necessarily going to get you rankings or get you traffic on the internet. It
is much better to pick out a name that reflects exactly what you are going
to do with your site, which will be reflected in your keywords, which is
what people will type in when they do a keyword search for your product.
This is the best way to get rankings and traffic when you have a new site.
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Pick a Hosting Platform: Picking a hosting
platform or operating system may take some research on your part if you
don’t know anything about the technical side of low cost web hosting. The
three choices for operating system platforms are generally Linux, UNIX, and
Windows. Windows is the most expensive, but also the most easy to use and
the easiest to get started with if you want to create the most professional
looking web site with the least amount of computer or technical knowledge.
This is because with windows, you can us FrontPage to create your site. With
a Linux or UNIX operating system, you will either have to use the free site
builder provided by the cheap web hosting company you sign up with, or learn
enough about web applications, scripting languages and data bases to be able
to to enjoy the immediate professional capabilities of software like
FrontPage. If you are just starting out, either option may be a bit
overwhelming, so the best thing to do may be to take the free site builder
offered by you hosting company to create your first site. Think of the free
site builder as a learning experience. It may not have everything that other
more professional sites will have, but it will give you the chance to learn
what all of the different scripting languages do as well as all of the other
basics of web hosting.
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Sign Up With your Hosting Company: Now
it’s finally time to pick a web host. If you are going with a Linux
hosting platform, you can pick almost any host that you want; with Windows,
there are fewer choices. There are many reasons why you might pick one
hosting company over another, but things to look for in a shared hosting
plan are price, disk space, bandwidth, included features, and free features.
Also, be sure to check out the data center, customer service, tech support,
and uptime. Read the contract thoroughly before you submit your domain name
for approval. Submitting your domain name is an important part of signing up
with an affordable web hosting company. Domain names are like phone numbers
in the fact that only one person can have a domain name because it
identifies who you are on the Internet. Your web hosting company will do a
domain name search for you to make sure that no one else has it and register
that domain name for you for the next year. If someone has your domain name,
they will make some suggestions, but you will have to keep trying until you
find one that is unique. After that, you can sign the contract and pay for
your website.
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Publish Your Site: Now, it’s time to
build your web site. You will do this by using FrontPage, another software
program, or the free site builder included in your web hosting package.
Either way, you don’t have to panic; there will be step by step
instructions and plenty of wizards to guide you. This is where you add your
pictures and content that you have created to your web site. You can do this
offline or online, and when you are finished, most hosting companies have an
automatic publishing feature.
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Get Rankings: Once your website is live,
you will want to look at getting rankings and getting traffic. One of the
ways you can do this through Search Engine Optimization. This is method to
get rankings by using your keywords and content to get links from other
sites pointed back to yours. This is why when you create your web site, it
is important that you pick a domain name, keywords, and content that will
let you create a site that is relevant to what people are already searching
for on the Internet. With relevant keywords and content you can get links to
other sites and become a relevant presence on the Internet. There are many
articles written about SEO on the Internet and once your site is created and
published, you can explore all of the possibilities to becoming a highly
ranked and successful site on the Internet.
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