Step-by-Step Guide to Create Your Own Website

Website Creation

If you are a newbie and you want to setup your own website to cut costs. You can try setting up using a WordPress-based platform – makes it easy for you and you can have it look like professionals do. So here is a step-by-step guide in how to create your own website.

Step 1: Choosing your own building platform

As advised, the easiest platform to use is WordPress. To build a fully working and great-looking websites is not really that hard – even for beginners! However, things can still go wrong if you picked the wrong platform. A lot of people have the wrong notion that creating a website from scratch is difficult and needs a high level of design and coding skills, but the thing is, there is actually no basis for that notion to hold true.

Remember that there are so many platforms you can use to create your own website. Such platforms are the following (we’ll only get to pick the top 10):

1. WordPress
2. Joomla
3. ModX
4. Drupal
5. TextPattern
6. RefineryCMS
7. Concrete5
8. DotNetNuke
9. Umbraco
10. TinyCMS

These are just among the few that are being used. The most popular of them all is WordPress, not only because it has cool themes and it’s easily accessible, but because of its fast installation and user-friendliness with so many themes and plugins to choose from that is readily available.

Among the ten, the top 3 and most widely used are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

Image and data credit: Opensource CMS

Anyway, based on the image above, half of the websites on the internet are running on WordPress platform.

However, there are those websites that offer free website creation such as Weebly, Webs, Wix and other similar websites where you need to register and enter your personal information. This may sound like a cool offer at first, but it’s not really advisable for a number of reasons such as:

1. No control of your website.
2. Limited design and functionality.
3. Pay if you want to lift the limit and get more of its features.

So, if you want to use WordPress, you can also refer to WordPress.com or WordPress.org for developer news and guide in setting up a WordPress platform.

Step 2:  Finding Your Web Hosting Provider and Picking a Domain Name

Did you know that some of the web hosting services has their own site installer to make it easy for you to setup your own WordPress-based website? You don’t have to be a pro to setup your own WordPress website.

Here are some of the website hosting services you can use:

1. Crucial.com.au
2. Hostgator.com
3. GoDaddy.com
4. iPower.com
5. Bluehost.com
6. Justhost.com
7. Fatcow.com
8. Arvixe.com
9. iPage.com
10. ixwebhosting.com

If you are unsure on which domain and hosting to use, let this be your guide in choosing your hosting service:

1. If you want to create a website for your business, it would be easy to use the company name as your domain name – yourcompany.com.
2. However, if you plan to set up a website for yourself to promote yourself, then simply use yourname.com as a preferred option.
3. If you are thinking of a different domain name, then here is what you need to consider:
   • Is it brandable? Choose the brand or name that best fits it.
   • Is it memorable? Make your choice short and understandable and easy to remember.
   • Is it catchy? It can be very difficult to pick a catchy and memorable name, but having a catchy domain name is easy for people to remember.
   • If you like the name, then go for it.
4. Pick the hosting service that provides you with the features you need.
5. Cheap does not necessarily mean the best. Remember, you get what you pay for.

Step 3: Setup of Your WordPress Website

When you have your website hosting, they usually have this one-click installation such as Softalicious for WordPress and other CMS platforms. The one-click installation will guide you on the information it needs to get you started with your website using WordPress.

We will soon have some video tutorials on how to setup your very first website.